[Problems and Other Stories shows once again that John Updike] is pre-eminent among contemporary writers of the short story, once thought the most American of literary forms. It is not that he has moved the form forward, as, for example, Hemingway did by forcing it into a new idiom, but that he has brought the dominant type of today's story—the New Yorker story—to its highest excellence. The type is characterized by sophistication, texture, smooth craftsmanship, and, on occasion, ingenuity of device…. "Shallow people get hurt, too," wrote critic Tom Shales this year, commenting on the television treatment of Updike's characters, the Maples, and thus summed up the basic appeal of an Updike story.

Shallow people suffer, too! The middle class living their surface lives on "the curve of sad time" have found in Updike their chronicler. He is skilled in conveying the substance of that life by giving us its texture….

Updike is at his best in the world of domestic conflict. At least ten of these stories have to do with failures in love and communication, between parents and children, between husband and wife. Most of them are about people in the act of separation or divorce. The point of view of the protagonist in these stories, whether he is called Maple or Fraser or Culp, seems the mirror of one and the same narcissistic sensibility. Even the pending loss of these characters' children, or the children's pain, serves only as a fillip to their various nursed guilts. And yet an uncanny sense of the universal is evoked by the nuances Updike achieves—the father leaving the shoe store with his child "a touch more tender with her, having witnessed the tenderness of others," the son in collision with his father, and smiling suddenly….

Updike is simply not very effective with major themes—even in the interesting story "Augustine's Concubine"; "For a thousand years, men would endeavor to hate the flesh, because of her." In a collection like this, it becomes apparent that Updike has one theme—the cherished, weak, and vulnerable self and the hazards attendant on its indulgence. But the ingeniousness of the frameworks he develops makes certain of these stories—such as the title story and the brilliant "Commercial"—classics of form and style.