The Maples Stories

The Maples Stories
by John Updike
These 18 short stories beautifully chart the arc of Richard and Joan Maple's relationship

Natasha Tripney
The Observer
Sunday 11 July 2010

Over the course of his long and prolific career, John Updike wrote a series of stories about Richard and Joan Maple, charting their marriage from its fresh, uncertain early days through to their eventual separation and divorce. The first of these 18 stories, "Snowing in Greenwich Village", was written in 1956 and showed the couple still tentatively feeling their way into their married life. Updike would revisit the Maples repeatedly over the next couple of decades, depicting the various shifts and rifts in their relationship as children arrive, four in all, their sex life tails off and the world around them changes.

The prospect of infidelity and the shadow cast by other lovers, real and imagined, looms large in many of the stories; in "Your Lover Just Called", they feed each other's jealousies, picking and probing. Updike is, as ever, sensitive to the fuzzy line between love and hate, the things people do to hurt one another, with and without meaning it, and the many tiny intimacies and outrages that make a marriage.

The stories are full of striking passages – the eroticism and awkwardness of Joan's undressing in front of her husband long after the sex has seeped out of their relationship in "Nakedness"; the vulnerabilities that are exposed in "Giving Blood"; the uneasy heat of "Wife-Wooing" – and Updike's rich prose, his rhythmic, acute, fertile and, at times, even somewhat glutting use of language.

The collection ends with "Grandparenting", with the now greying Maples, both remarried, awaiting the birth of their daughter's first child, still tied together by old, familiar threads, even though their time as husband and wife is long behind them.


http://www.guardian.co.uk/books/2010/jul/11/maples-stories-john-updike-review