I’ve tried to read Updike’s novels, Couples and Villages, both wore me out. So far it’s been a positive experience reading My Father’s Tears, and I’m finding the vernacular very easy to step into, where as the two novels I just mentioned were hard cases to say the least.
Craig Martin finds himself looking around at his own piece of land, his home and how it got to be the way it is. Looking back on what has happened in the history of his property seems like a dull way to approach telling a story, Updike pulls me in, and you might find this story to be very interesting. The narrator imagines the wagons that pulled the trees which were cut down by a previous owner to create enough space to build the home he now lives in. It’s a slow sizzle, looking around at the things which surround you, and Updike does it with a caretakers ease, all things will come to pass, and Craig knows this.
Eventually he thinks about his own marriage, his friends, and how he likes to hit golf balls into the woods. His mind wanders, and then he ends up in the woods looking at the discarded items that over the years have arrived to rest forever on his property, tires, cars, bikes, and eventually he discovers the golf balls that he hit years earlier, half buried in the mud, yellowed by time. This is the start of an era for the narrator, and a way for Updike to explain time. All of this wrapped up, makes for a very effective story.
-JR
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