I recently picked up the two volumes of John Updike’s collected stories. I’ve read many of them in their separate books over the years, but there’s an extra benefit to seeing them all in one place, in the order that they were written. As I’ve written before, I think Updike’s novels from his middle and late period are pretty bad, but the stories from these periods are great, even those that show some exhaustion with age.

Yesterday I read an Updike story from the early 2000s called The Varieties of Religious Experience. The title reminded me of the classic Irwin Shaw story, Main Currents of American Thought. The stories have nothing in common other than their titles, and Shaw is pretty much forgotten nowadays . . . in some way, Updike is similar to Philip K. Dick as a writer in that he takes the same few characters and recycles them through lots of similar situations. Dick has the pathetic lead character (“Joe Chip”), the reliable older man (“Runciter”), and the nagging wife (the sister in Confessions of a Crap Artist). Updike has the “Updike” character (a student or young man in the early stories, then a young husband and father, then a divorcing middle-aged man, then a rueful man in late middle age, drifting among his own thoughts), along with various supporting characters. I like lots of individual Updike stories but I’ve gotta say that the best are the Maples stories because these are the only ones where the woman character is as strong as the man. Joan gives as good as she gets.

The Varieties of Religious Experience is an unusual Updike story in that it centers on a public event—the 9/11 attacks—and it offers multiple perspectives, including an elderly “Updike” visiting his adult (divorced, of course) daughter in New York, and then also a scene with two of the hijackers and another on one of the planes. Many of Updike’s novels are deeply concerned with current events, but his stories usually focus on internal or local interpersonal drama, with the outside world being only implied. And I don’t think this was one of Updike’s most successful stories or even one of his better late stories.

Still, the story moved me. Reading it reminded me of how it felt in New York when the towers went down. We were all completely numb for about two weeks—it was hard to think about anything else at all—, and even for years later it was in the front of my mind. All my thoughts revolved around it. Maybe the best analogy is how, in the first two years of the 2020s, the pandemic seemed to be all that mattered. But the World Trade Center attack was different in that this special effect was concentrated locally. Everybody was shocked by the event, but it’s my impression that people living in New York were particularly shaken, even those of us not living or working close to that neighborhood.

Reading the story now, my thoughts immediately turned to those residents of Kiev, Gaza, Beirut, and Tehran whose buildings were destroyed by sudden strikes from the sky. I imagine that this has to feel a lot like the World Trade Center attacks, but much more so, as the bombs kept coming and coming. After 9/11 we were waiting for the other shoe to drop, but it didn’t—or, at least, not locally.

I wonder what Updike would think. He had mixed feelings about the Vietnam war at a time when many American writers and intellectuals opposed it (in 1966, he wrote, “I am for our intervention if it does some good–specifically, if it enables the people of South Vietnam to seek their own political future. . . .”, but then a year later he wrote, “The bombing of the North seems futile as well as brutal and should be stopped” and “I differ, perhaps, from my unanimously dovish confrères in crediting the Johnson administration with good faith and some good sense”). So I don’t know if, in writing about the feelings of Americans watching their towers come down, he thought about the Vietnamese seeing that happening to them, decades before. When I saw the attack on live TV back in September 2001, I remember thinking about the historical context, but it still shook me in a way that a comparable event in another country, or even another city, would not have. I don’t know anyone in Kiev, Gaza, Beirut, and Tehran (I have ancestors who were from “near Kiev” but that was such a different time that I can’t really make the connection in my mind), so it’s hard for me to say how the residents of those cities might feel; indeed, even if I knew people living in these places, it would be a stretch of imagination to picture their emotions. Which I guess is one reason we have fiction.