Doglegs of Decrepitude

By Paul Gray

John Updike's first collection of short stories, The Same Door, appeared in 1959. Depending on how his voluminous work is categorized, he has produced either five, seven or nine such collections since then. (Don't ask; it gets complicated.) In any case, with The Afterlife and Other Stories (Knopf; 316 pages; $24), Updike enters a fifth decade of turning out new short fiction, and neither he nor his stories seem any the worse for wear.

The same, however, cannot be said of the people within these tales. Almost to a man -- and yes, for those readers to whom such things matter, the points of view here are exclusively male -- they have seen better days. Their names vary -- Carter Billings, Fred Emmet, Geoffrey Parrish, and so forth throughout 22 stories -- but they all share similar characteristics and complaints. They are well-to-do, approaching 60 or edgily leaving it behind; most have second wives (or third, or multiples thereof) and a clutch of grown children who have become more or less strangers to them. Sexual passion for these duffers-in- waiting is largely a matter of fond remembrance. To them, pleasure has come to mean European vacations, accompanied by a younger spouse who gripes about their erratic driving, or a week away with the old boys. The hero of Farrell's Caddie goes to Scotland with some of his golfing cronies, seeking the invigoration of actually walking the course rather than, as he does at his club back home, riding an electric cart and feeling resigned "to a golfing mediocrity that would poke its way down the sloping dogleg of decrepitude to the level green of death." In a mysterious way, Farrell's quest is rewarded. His local caddie hands him a club and suggests, in passing, that he leave his wife back in the U.S.: "She never was yer type. Tae proper." Rattled, Farrell responds, "Shouldn't this be a wedge?"

This preternatural, comic exchange typifies the sort of redemptive elation offered by nearly every story in The Afterlife. Updike's heroes may -- and do -- regularly pine for what they have lost. Three stories -- A Sandstone Farmhouse, The Other Side of the Street and The Black Room -- play variations on the same theme: aging men return to the neighborhood or the very home of their happy childhood, where they find themselves confronting evidence of their own transiency in space and time.

But not all is nostalgia; even the most unpromising of present moments can yield something worth remembering. In Short Easter, a character named Fogel spends a dull holiday Sunday, lacking an hour thanks to the arrival of daylight savings time, enduring a brunch and some enforced lawn care with his wife. Alone for a while, he turns on the TV and finds some golf: "The tour had moved east from the desert events, with lavender mountains in the background and emerald fairways imposed upon sand and cactus and with ancient Hollywood comedians as tournament sponsors, to courses in the American South, with trees in tender first leaf and azaleas in lurid bloom." Fogel may not fully appreciate his own perception of spring's arrival, but Updike's readers will; these stories are exemplars of narrative skill and descriptive generosity.