“Sons” (1973)
Reading John Updike’s Complete Stories

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. A hyperlinked list of the compete stories appears below.

[“Sons” was written in Ipswich in 1973, published in the April 21, 1973 issue of The New Yorker, collected in Problems, The Early Stories, and the Library of America’s Collected Early Stories.]

John Updike would have likely called this story “Fathers and Sons” had the title not been taken. It’s a memoir, some of it possibly imagined but none of it amounting to a story, broken into eight inventive vignettes about one son or another in the genealogical tree, going back well into the 19th century, beginning and ending with the author’s–let’s say the narrator’s–own high-strung teen-age son, “in this trying year of 1973.” Trying for the United States, but especially for Updike. He leaves the ironic line unexplained.

The scene moves to the narrator’s own childhood and the by-now overly familiar settings of his homes in Pennsylvania, his father the maternally affectionate teacher, the harsher mother, the fights between mother and father. Not yet half-way through the Updike oeuvre and he is already repeating himself profusely, down to the yearning for the Monday ride back to school in Shillington-Olinger, though neither is named in the story.

The narrator’s father has his own brief cameo as a young boy with a paper route, then back to the 1880s for his father, and a clue about the family predisposition for surliness: “his father’s old sorrow bore him down into depression, into hatred of life.” The narrator lifts us from the dark by bringing us back into the present, the young father watching his younger son triumph in a soccer game. Then more of the same, with three tableaux to go. It gets a bit dreary, predictable even with regards to the narrator’s older son, who’s never made more than a passing appearance before. “Our visitor, our prisoner.” It’s time to turn the page.

–P.T.

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

Title	Year Written	First Published	First Collected
Ace In the Hole	1954	New Yorker, April 9, 1955	The Same Door (1959)
Friends From Philadelphia	1954	New Yorker, Oct. 30, 1954	The Same Door (1959)
A Game of Botticelli	1954	The Liberal Context, Fall 1963	Collected Early Stories (2013)
Tomorrow and Tomorrow and So Forth	1955	New Yorker, Apr. 30, 1954	The Same Door (1959)
Dentistry and Doubt	1955	New Yorker, Oct. 29, 1955	The Same Door (1959)
Snowing in Greenwich Village (The Maples)	1955	New Yorker, Jan. 21, 1956	The Same Door (1959)
The Kid's Whistling	1955	New Yorker, Dec. 3, 1955	The Same Door (1959)
Toward Evening	1955	New Yorker, Feb. 11, 1956	The Same Door (1959)
Who Made Yellow Roses Yellow	1956	New Yorker, April 7, 1956	The Same Door (1959)
Wife-wooing (The Maples)	1960	New Yorker, March 12, 1960	Pigeon Feathers (1962)
Giving Blood (The Maples)	1963	New Yorker, April 6, 1963	The Music School (1966)
Twin Beds in Rome (The Maples)	1963	New Yorker, February 6, 1964	The Music School (1966)
The Bulgarian Poetess (Bech)	1964	New Yorker, March 13, 1965	Bech: A Book (1970)
Bech in Rumania	1966	New Yorker, Oct. 8, 1966	Bech: A Book (1970)
Bech Takes Pot Luck	1968	New Yorker, Oct. 7, 1968	Bech: A Book (1970)
Rich in Russia (Bech)	1969	New Yorker, Jan. 31, 1970	Bech: A Book (1970)
Bech Swings?	1969	New Yorker, Jan. 31, 1970	Bech: A Book (1970)
Bech Panics	1970	No magazine publication	Bech: A Book (1970)
Bech Enters Heaven	1970	No magazine publication	Bech: A Book (1970)
The Gun Shop	1972	New Yorker, Feb. 25, 1972	Problems (1979)
Believers	1972	Harper's, July 1972	Problems (1979)
How to Love America and Leave It at the Same Time	1972	New Yorker, Aug. 19, 1972	Problems (1979)
Nevada	1972	Playboy, January 1974	Problems (1979)
Sons	1973	New Yorker, April 21, 1973	Problems (1979)
Daughter, Last Glimpse Of	1973	New Yorker, November 5, 1973	Problems (1979)
Ethiopia	1973	New Yorker, Jan. 14, 1974	Problems (1979)
Transaction	1973	Oui, March 1974	Problems (1979)
Augustine's Concubine	1974	The Atlantic, April 1975	Problems (1979)

Except for most of the Maples stories and the Henry Bech stories, the summaries and analyses are based on the texts presented in the two-volume Library of America edition of the complete stories (2013).