(Click to order)

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.

[“Snowing in Greenwich Village” was published in The New Yorker issue of Jan. 21, 1956, collected in The Same Door, Too Far to Go, The Early Stories and the Library of America’s Collected Early Stories.]

The first of the Maple stories. There would not be another for five years, suggesting that at the time Updike did not see Joan and Richard Maples as anything more than another one of his generic stand-ins for John and Mary Updike, though the Maples live, for now, in Greenwich Village. (The Updikes had moved into a small apartment on Riverside Drive, on the Upper West Side in 1955). They are uneasy about their surroundings, uneasy about each other. (Updike disliked New York City. He has one of his characters complain inelegantly of seeing homosexuals everywhere.) They’ve been married nearly two years. It’s snowing, or about to snow.

The Maples have Rebecca Cune over. She lives nearby. She “allowed Richard Maple to slip off her coat and scarf even as she stood gently greeting Joan.” Slip off. And we’re off.

It’s a wooden evening, made odd by Rebecca’s translation of most happenings as odd. Richard then walks her to her nearby apartment, the tension between them cooled by the slight snow: “Few experiences so savor of the illicit as mounting stairs behind a woman’s fanny.” They flirt. The tension is the pleasure, palpable, new for Richard, like the city, dangerous. But the consummation is put off. “Oh, they were close.”

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