John Updike [in his "Problems and Other Stories"] has some questions to put to us; "problems" to pose, as math teachers used to use the word, not in the contemporary, fallen sense of "Don't mind John Updike, he's just having problems at home." The problems concern divorce, the guilt of divorce, childhood memories, the guilt attaching to certain childhood memories, lust, the guilt that follows hard upon lust, and the fate of American Protestantism. (p. 1)

I find [the title story] "Problems" to be a work of really awesome literary cunning. The cunning, or much of it, is in the sudden darkening of the question: "Which has he more profoundly betrayed?" The words "more profoundly" rescue the passage from a weakening-by-cleverness. They lack coolness in exactly the right degree; they seem emoted rather than devised. They call us back from the play of wit—real wit, for once, like Thackeray's or Pope's—to remind us of the human costliness of an everyday situation. That is what John Updike does for a living: he reminds us of what things humanly cost. (pp. 1, 44)

[The title story] lifts the hood on John Updike's fiction …: it reveals by its very abstraction the machine that is forever intensifying and multiplying the moral complexities of "Domestic Life in America"—another of his starkly literal titles. It's implicit in this description of what Updike does in his fiction that he risks a charge of perversity: why should he intensify and multiply already immense and painful life problems? Is he, as critics like John Gardner bent on "moral" fiction might say, merely exploitive and indulgent? Is he finally lurid, in a book such as "Couples," about divorce and lust and guilt, rather than (I suppose) uplifting?

By way of answering, it's crucial to observe that the story called "Problems" does not come with answers, not even printed upside down or in the back of the book. Updike is, of course, powerfully learned in the handful of subjects to which he devotes himself almost exclusively in this book; his imagination has schooled itself assiduously on the relevant anguish and pain; but his acquired learning does not amount to a confidence in answers. No, the purpose of his meticulous and mostly melancholy discriminations of feeling, his sharpening of the teeth of every moment of ordinary life, the end to which all the metaphorical exactions of his style are tending, is roughly this: he wants to increase, to make more specific and empirical our sense of how difficult it is to perceive and judge clearly where love of any kind has entered. But the necessity of perception and judgment in Updike's world is constant. If this is wisdom, it is the Socratic sort, which abounds in questions and respects the hard limits of what we can truly know….

In general the issue of Updike's style is a difficult one, and all that can be said with any assurance is that it is part of Updike's own silent insistence that his style is the center, maybe the substance, of his art. Although most of the time it's bound tightly to the work of describing the world, it also has the means and the inclination to call attention to itself. Every few pages we are struck by what might be called a "writer's word," such as "claxon" or "cruciform." Or, more often, we come upon a metaphor of astonishing deftness and efficiency; so deft and efficient, paradoxically, that it's liable to distract us. (p. 44)

The opening story in "Problems" describes in deadpan a late-night television commercial for noiseless gas heating. Then it describes the man who is watching, after his wife has gone to sleep; then how he urinates, goes to bed, lies awake, goes to look at the stars … finally puts in his earplugs and then succeeds at last in sleeping. There is a peace in this story that is absent from the awkward and disorderly domestic situations that make up "Nevada," "Separating" and even "The Gun Shop"; a peace that has no place at all in the events or situations of the daylight world as Updike sees it. But some echo of the opening story, some sympathy with the point of view of a solitary man in a soundless, sleeping world is always present in Updike's prose, even at its busiest. It may be that an ultimate privacy is what gives his style its intrinsic tone. Yet Updike is also the finest living describer of the physical world we all share. The paradox in this is the one Jack Yeats built into his definition of art: "the public act of a private man."

One might go further: What gives poignance to so many scenes of intimacy in Updike's fiction is that they are "done" in the voice of someone who has some stubborn difficulties in truly being intimate. For isn't it, after all, the failure of intimacy that preoccupies him? It is the refusal to give, to yield, to share, to forgo, and above all the refusal to stay, the decision to leave, that relentlessly creates the dilemmas in the lives of his characters. They hurt each other by persisting in their privacy when they shouldn't; what they lack is the means of doing otherwise.

Something more needs saying about Updike as a student of the institutions of staying and leaving, marriage and divorce. There is something he leaves out, a possibility he fails to conceive, and that is the possibility that Eros can be a force for order. This book is haunted terrifically by a fear that the world will fall apart because some of our homes do…. This fear no doubt accounts for the enormous energy of description in Updike: as if those words could make solid a world threatened with disintegration. The source of the threat is sexual love. Its main effect in Updike's books is to separate people, not unite them (except on lonely beaches or in hotel rooms, and then not for long). Now this is most certainly an honest perception on Updike's part. But I submit that, whatever its status as a natural fear or an honest perception, it is still a cliché, the only unexamined idea perhaps in Updike's work.

But that is no note to end on. "Problems and Other Stories" won't be surpassed by any collection of short fiction in the next year, and perhaps not in the next 10. Its satisfactions are profound, and the proper emotion is one of gratitude that such a splendid artistic intelligence has been brought to bear on some of the important afflictions of our times. (p. 45)