John Updike’s Maples Stories

Updike was a major American writer who, I suspect, is not often read by people under thirty. In addition to his attempt to understand EROS (love and sex) and THANATOS (death and the quest for meaning) as well as pursuing the ideas of Kierkegaard and Karl Barth, Updike was a master prose stylist. At the sentence level he was great. 

We see an example of this prose style in this sentence from one of his Maples Stories. In addition to writing a long yet readable sentence with a semicolon, Updike creates a unique metaphor that compares a struggling marriage with home repair.

It is, perhaps, ironic for Updike to have such beautiful language in a series of stories about an unhappy marriage. Here is what he had to say:

Though the Maples stories trace the decline and fall of a marriage, they also illuminate a history in many ways happy, of growing children and a million mundane moments shared. That a marriage ends is less than ideal; but all things end under heaven, and if temporality is held to be invalidating, then nothing real succeeds. The moral of these stories is that all blessings are mixed. Also, that people are incorrigibly themselves.