After the glittering and extravagant landscapes of The Coup, we return in [Problems and Other Stories] to more familiar domestic terrain—gas stations in Nevada, church basements, motels, subways, bathrooms. We are back in the world of Everyman's everyday suffering and everyday grace….

Heroically mundane, still desperately hopeful, their minds echoing with quotations from Blake and St. Augustine and esoteric scraps of information about extinct ungulates, Updike's characters stumble bravely on through the dark world, remembering past innocence and past delights, for they are aging and guilty, victims of the "curve of sad time" which Updike invokes in his dedication…. And yet, as always with Updike, there are moments of exhilaration, phrases that redeem the prevailing sense of loss. Something gleams just beyond the edge of vision, and one of his many particular gifts is his ability to suggest it, to catch it, to persuade us that after all this sorry pageant is not a pageant but a serious enterprise, and one worthy of serious endeavor, however inevitable the ultimate defeat. (p. 1)

There are readers who find [Updike's] union of the literary and the mundane highly artificial and self-conscious, too close to the bravura writing of a star performer in a creative-writing course. To me it seems natural, though one or two of the stories have a suspicious neatness—"From the Journal of a Leper," for instance, tells the tale of a potter with a skin disease who seeks treatment, is finally cured of his complaint and loses both his woman and his inspiration, a tale too tidy to be very interesting. But this is one of the rare failures; in other stories geometric plots (and problems) are used with considerable wit. Others, yet again, contain volumes….

There is a great deal in this collection that praises the decent and the orderly and the merciful—who but Updike would make "Minutes of the Last Meeting," about the nonfunctioning Tarbox Committee for Equal Development and Betterment for Young and Old Alike, neither satiric nor sentimental, but affectionate and funny? Yet the stronger winds still blow where they list, and man, even when stumbling down to the subway, still lives in the eye of God.

It is hard for an English reader to comment on Updike's portrayal of America, for to us the deliberately familiar has a touch of the exotic….

In The Coup Updike created an imaginary world, a Coleridgean fantasy, a myth; here he has reverted to the Wordsworthian, revealing hints of the supernatural in the events of everyday material life. He has braved the great themes, and noticed the unnoticeable, treating both with equal respect, an achievement that does him much honor. (p. 4)