Volume 42, Number 1 · January 12, 1995
The Downhill Slope
By Rosemary Dinnage
The Afterlife and Other Stories
by John Updike
Knopf, 316 pp., $24.00
A Private View
by Anita Brookner
Random House, 253 pp., $23.00
We are lucky, those of us who are aging in step with such writers as Updike and Brookner, as they chart in their totally different ways the downhill slope. Updike, in his stories especially, has always been acutely aware of mutability, moments inching away, moments of illumination that show gulfs of time before and after. Here we have an Updike afterlife of revisitings, uneasy remarryings, leave-takings, and stock-takings. But though he is concerned with ebbing powers and a contracting world, he of course writes of these with his usual fertile energy. If his last two novels have disappointed some people, when he gets his hands on the short story the master can do no wrong.
Review, 2494 words
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