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Trust Me (Magill Book Reviews)

At a glance:

  • Author: John Updike
  • First Published: 1987
  • Type of Work: Short Stories
  • Genres: Short fiction

In the title story of the volume, a child, urged to jump into a swimming pool, slips through his father’s waiting arms and plunges into the blue water. Later, the same person, grown to adulthood, is fed hashish by his adolescent son. Neither incident is the stuff of tragedy in itself, but the betrayal of children by parents, of fathers by sons, the betrayal of promise by life that these events come to embody, is the informing subject of the collection. The philandering husbands here, stricken by Sunday morning glimpses of beautiful women at the gas station, and the wives, detected as they speed their lovers to the eight o’clock train, are familiar players in Updike’s continuing chronicle of the lost descendants of the Puritans, characters who have aged into a bemused and sometimes comic consciousness of the passage of time. In “The Wallet,” an elderly man’s trivial loss presages an awareness of death; in “More Stately Mansions,” a cuckolded husband watches his rival collapse into alcoholism, abandoned as he once was; in “The Leaf Season,” a ritual visit to New Hampshire by a group of old friends is unexpectedly suffused with an autumnal melancholy.

Updike, here as elsewhere, is a master of form and tone. There are few missteps here. Even the least effective of the stories is neatly crafted and highly polished, pivoting on a sudden perception or resonant image. The strongest ones leave shards likely to prick the reader’s imagination long after the book is closed.