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This series is a re-reading of John Updike’s short stories in the wake of the publication of “The Collected Early Stories” and “The Collected Later Stories,” the twin-volume set by the Library of America (2013). A comprehensive table of the complete stories with links to each story summary appears below. The commentaries include the Maple and Bech stories, most of which are excluded from the Library of America edition. Contact the editor for questions, debates or corrections.

[“How to Love America and Leave It at the Same Time” was published in the Aug. 19, 1972 issue of The New Yorker, collected in Problems, The Early Stories, and the Library of America’s Collected Early Stories.]

The meaning of America in five pages. Or rather, evocations on the vast joys of being in America, the country’s roadside romance evoked by its vastness, the generosity of its distances and empty canvasses, ready to be filled in. Updike or his protagonist, again interchangeable here, fill one in as the family takes a road trip through the west of mesas, orange landscapes and grandiloquent vistas. They stop for the night at a motel.

From there, the protagonist imagines and reflects, freely associating sounds and sights with his words. A siren’s sound is trigger to the thought of a sudden intrusive death: “Imagine an old Californian, with parched white beard and a mountain goat’s unfriendly stare, his whole life from birth soaked in this altitude, this view, this locality until an hour ago unknown to you and after tomorrow never to be known again–imagine him dead, his life in a blood-blind moment wrenched from his chest like a root from a tummock.” (The choice of tummock is anachronistic and pretentious, tummock being neither an American word nor one recognizable by most dictionaries. Updike was going for alliteration and got lazy.)

It’s not the only image of death, that death Updike’s characters can’t run from, even on vacation, though it’s not a depressing image. It’s even witty, celebratory in a Walt Whitman sort of way: “Think of the dead unknown,” he goes on, “–plodding flights of angels–who dared cross this land of inhuman grandeur without highways, without air conditioning, without even (a look underneath confirms) shock absorbers, jolting and rattling each inch, in order to arrive here and create this town, wherein this wagon has become a receptacle for (a look inside discovers) empty cans of Coors Beer, Diet Pepsi, and Mountain Dew.”

He pushes the rediscovery down to a rebranding of one of the country’s iconic odes to itself: “This is America, a hamburger kingdom, one cuisine, under God, indivisible, with pickles and potato chips for all.”

Of course, being Updike, he can’t help dropping in a bit of chauvinism, of comparative-culture chest-thumping. Until now the story had the breeziness of its vacationers’ impressions, but it takes a turn for the Ugly American way, if only briefly, as if the traveling protagonist was Clem of “I Am Dying, Egypt, Dying”: “When a Japanese says ‘Japanese,’ he is trapped on a little definite racial fact, whereas when we say ‘American’ it is not a fact, it is an act, of faith, a matter of lines on a map and words on paper, an outline it will take generations and centuries more to fill in.” Filling in that paragraph with the image of the waitress as illustration of “these meditation” doesn’t improve maters, but it barely weakens the rest of the meditation, a vacation from Updike’s usual angsts for a trip through his great love: “America is a conspiracy to make you happy.”

John Updike: The Complete Stories (Click on Links for Summaries and Analyses)