Raising the last glass

My Father’s Tears, by John Updike

Although an air of valediction inevitably hovers over this collection of short stories, the last of John Updike’s more than 60 books and published in the wake of his death, it is in no way a depressing read. On the contrary: there is something exhilarating about finding him maintaining to the very end not just his brilliance of observation and narrative but his passionate appreciation of life.

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Lee Cohen

Mandelson is the wrong man, at the wrong time

Updike’s writing has often been unapologetically autobiographical; his biographer will not have to decode the life from the work. These stories, apart from the first, a tale of an uneasy family holiday in North Africa in 1969, were all written and published during his last decade, and all of them reflect the preoccupations of an aging man; health, family difficulties, the waning of sexual passion, the continuing search for love.