So many of John Updike's characters seem to inhabit the suburbs of Splitsville and to toy with infidelity as soon as the shower presents are unwrapped that one things of them as naturally polygamous…. [It seems odd] that the gracenote of Updike's fiction should be optimism—a radiant box of corn flakes in the kitchen mess, a cascade of Calgonite offering an epiphany in the dishwasher, and so forth—because his people are not so much learning marriage as pondering a way out of it….

Leaving aside the banality of this collection's title ["Too Far to Go"] (is it the "so long, so far" line of Donne's "The Extasie" hammered into Americanese?), there are several implausibilities in the stories. I am used to Updike's married men not having jobs, just as I am used to having him send his characters into the den to watch television so that he can make "Charlie's Angels" into a theology lesson, but Richard Maple looks so damnably unemployed that one begins to think this may be the cause of all the domestic uproar. "Domestic uproar" is a wild overstatement; indeed, that is my second suspicion of implausibility…. It strains one's credibility to read divorce stories in which none of the partners say "I could kill you!" or "You'll be sorry!"

But perhaps this is the very feature that distinguished them from the common run of howling, wound-licking, look-what-you-did-to-me fictions of recent years. They are the most civilized stories imaginable, and because of this the most tender. Updike, I thought when I read his novel "Marry Me," is the poet of the woe that is in marriage. It is rather to his credit that he conceives of marriage as something other than a Jabberwock; and because he avoids the pique and self-pity in that trap, his stories are celebrations rather than warnings. (p. 7)

If there is something seriously missing here, it is Joan's point of view. I think any married woman could quite justifiably accuse Updike of weighting his argument in favor of Richard; worse, he seems to want us to sympathize with and understand Richard, while at the same time pitying Joan. If the Maples were not being whirled apart—without a divorce they would hardly be worth writing about—this probably wouldn't matter; but it strikes me as special pleading to omit the other side of the story. We know too little about Joan and her analyst and her lovers and her panic.

"The moral of these stories is that all blessings are mixed," Updike writes in his foreword. "Also, that people are incorrigibly themselves." He might say as well that no one really belongs to anyone else and that marriage is an institution in which the exits are clearly marked. Updike is one of the few people around who has given subtle expression to what others have dismissed and cheapened by assuming it is a nightmare. The Maples are never closer than when they are performing their ceremony of divorce. (p. 34)