IN 1979, two collections of John Updike's stories appeared, Too Far To Go, published in February by Fawcett, and Problems, published by Knopf in October. Rather than review these books by themselves, I want to discuss the stories in the new collections that round out one distinct phase of Updike's involvement with themes of family life. It is a phase which began with the Olinger stories and which follows a single narrator through his adolescence, marriage, and divorce. From story to story, this narrator appears in slightly different guises—his name changes, he lives in different towns or cities. Of course, not all the narrators of all the stories are this narrator; but from the Olinger fictions to the most recent ones, certain traits of character and key repetitions from a particular life story identify several heroes as one man.

To a great extent, the tension in these stories derives from the conflict between the illusions fueling the adult from the past and the demands made on him as a parent and husband in the present. His childhood hopes, desires, dreams are frustrated by family life, and Updike's narrator is constantly turning back—less and less, however, to rediscover his childhood's glory. As he passes through his cycles of hope, discouragement, and liberation, his childhood becomes the text which he earnestly studies for clues to who he is and what he should do and how he got into his situation in the first place. Over the 20 or so years during which Updike has published stories, much of the drama has been generated by the narrator's changing view of his relation to his mother and father, as well as the changing way he regards their marriage. In fact, his first marriage seems largely undertaken in imitation of his parents'. The narrator's slow coming to terms with his unhappiness in the marriage, his falling in love, and gradual accumulation of the nerve to act (to divorce and remarry)—all these occur because of revisions in his understanding of the past.