John Updike wrote around 250 short stories, the vast majority of which are from the perspective of the “Updike” character. As has been well documented, they’re based on himself, his family, and particular events that happened in his life. This corpus of stories includes one series with a single pair of characters—Richard and Joan Maples, modeled after Updike and his first wife, Mary. The Maples stories were written over the period of decades and, collected, are the length of a short book.

The 200 other stories about the “Updike” character mostly feature new characters, new names, and new settings in each story. There stories don’t have continuity; rather, they offer a kaleidoscopic view of this character’s life as he develops from an adolescent to a young man to a young husband and father to a divorcing middle-aged man to a reflective man in late middle age. It’s kind of amazing. Most of the stories have little to no plot, and the characters (other than “Updike”) are mostly not portrayed so vividly, but it’s very moving, living inside Updike’s head and seeing everything he sees: a curated GoPro, as it were.

So here’s my question: Why did Updike do it that way? Why did he tell his life in two hundred mostly unconnected stories, rather than in a series of novels? Or, for that matter, memoir? Updike of course did write many novels, but they’re mostly not about the “Updike” character. He did write a memoir or two, but these are primarily of interest because of what they reflect on the fiction.

A direct answer to why Updike told his story in distinct short fiction rather than novels is that he got into a rhythm with the short stories. They gave him a regular audience and a steady income, he’d figured out a way to transmute his life and thoughts into fiction. For him, novels served a different function.

I can relate to that. I get into a rhythm with blogging, then I also write research articles and books. These different sorts of writing reach different audiences, but, more to the point, they’re different ways for me to express myself. Kind of like if I wrote about different topics using pencil, pen, typewriter, or word processor.

There’s still the question of why introduce new characters and situations for each story (with the notable exception of the Maples series). Why not one long series? Why new names, new cities, new occupations, new minor character quirks for each story?

I can’t say, and I don’t know that any critics have asked this question . . . the answer I’ll venture is that, by fragmenting his perspective in this way, by telling a life from 200 slightly different angles, Updike is giving a kaleidoscopic view that’s special in its own way. As a writer, Updike is hardly modernist, but one could argue that his larger life’s project has a modernist aspect. Each of his sort stories is a coherent whole, but the collection of stories, constructed over decades, give a sort of cubist view of “Updike” and, indeed, of Updike himself.

Also, it wasn’t just Updike. Back in the day, many serious authors of fiction expressed themselves by writing new stories and scenarios with new characters each time: consider Irwin Shaw, John Cheever, John O’Hara, F. Scott Fitzgerald, Ernest Hemingway, etc. Series characters and continuity were more of a genre-writing thing, with Sherlock Holmes, Hercule Poirot, Tarzan, Nancy Drew, and all the rest. So I guess a lot of this was just that Updike was following the literary conventions of his time. But, for whatever reason, the result–the fragmented perspective constructed out of hundreds of different stories–is amazing.

P.S. Also, one minor thing, no big deal but it’s something I noticed after reading all these stories in succession: There are a bunch he wrote around the time when he was going through a divorce, and in just about all of them, the protagonist notices that his first wife has been putting on weight. Not that she’s ever obese, just that she’s getting bigger. If this happened in just a few stories, or if it was just in the context of a novel, I’d say that this my-first-wife-is-getting-fat thing is some hangup of the character. But it happens over and over again—we see it from many angles of the kaleidoscope—enough so that it’s gotta be Updike’s thing. That’s fine—everybody’s got issues, and a big part of what makes Updike, and other authors, great, is that they’re not trying to smooth away their awkward or unpleasant aspects. Still, it’s kinda funny. The purest illustration comes in a story where “Updike”‘s wife is an identical twin, and, during the story, the wife gets fatter, the twin gets thinner, and “Updike” ends up with the twin, commenting on her boniness. The point seems to be that the first and second wife are just two different versions of the same person, just representing different stages in “Updike”‘s life. The other funny thing about this is that, if you look at photos of the couple, Mary Updike doesn’t look fat at all!

P.P.S. If you look at enough of those stories, you will find some recurring names (the Updike stand-in is sometimes named “David Kern,” and his hometown is often called “Olinger”), but these stories still don’t show a continuity. In their totality they’re presenting a fragmented perspective of a life, so I think my “cubist” take still stands.

P.P.P.S. OK, just one more thing. I like almost all of these stories, even the less famous ones, some are absolute masterpieces, and their combined effect is stunning. But there was one story that was really bad, called “Licks of Love in the Heart of the Cold War.” To start with there’s the title, which is a lame pun, with “licks” referring to musical riffs—the protagonist of the story is a banjo player—and also a sex act. Lots of critics are exhausted or annoyed by Updike’s fascination with the memories of sex, his male gaze, etc., but that doesn’t bother me. Updike’s subject is his own life, and the images and emotions he shares seem as real as anything else would be. As an analogy, consider someone like James Jones, who wrote book after book about the army. That was central to his life, and he wrote about it. Writing about one of Updike’s later collections, critic James Wood writes, “If Updike’s earlier work was consumed with wife-swapping, his late work is consumed by nostalgia for it.” That’s accurate. But then Wood follows up with, “The dismaying thing about this collection is that Updike appears to be ascribing a value to adultery which it no longer has. . . . But it is now hard to share Updike’s extreme valuation . . . and the effect is to make Updike seem not only dated, but provincial and minor: the great, central writers do not seem to date in quite this way.” I disagree! Great writers often ascribe high value to their transformative life experiences; that’s how it is. You can feel uncomfortable with Updike’s values and find his perspective “provincial,” but I don’t think that makes the work “minor” or even “dated” except in the way that Jane Austen is dated and Mark Twain is dated and everyone is a product of their time.

Buuuuuut, ok, that one story, “Licks of Love in the Heart of the Cold War”: it’s really terrible. I like the other stories in that collection (sorry, James!) but this one is as bad as Updike’s later novels. It’s a mess, and not in an interesting way. The big problem is, interestingly enough, the writing style, in which the narration oscillates unstably between a homespun countrified style (as befitting a banjo player, I guess) and the traditional Updike diction that usually comes from the mouths of his well-educated white collar set. It just makes no sense at all, really a failure of editing that nobody caught it. The story was rejected by the New Yorker, so that’s something, but then Updike showed poor judgment by not fixing its flaws. Had he maintained perspective (either in the “banjo” voice or by giving the character the usual “Updike” background), I think the story could’ve worked just fine.

But, yeah, that’s just one story. Overall the kaleidoscope works very well, and I’m ok hitting the occasional dud. Contra Wood, I think Updike’s high productivity, at least when it comes to the stories, contributes in a good way to the overall effect. 100 of these stories telling the life from different perspectives would’ve been great; 200 is even better, giving me even more views inside.