The Maples Stories - Rambling Readers

Hardcover, 256 pages

English language

Published March 18, 2009 by Alfred A. Knopf.

ISBN:: 978-0-307-27176-1

(1 review)

These eighteen classic stories from John Updike's career form a luminous chronicle of the life and times of one marriage in all its rich emotional complexity.

In 1956, Updike published a story, "Snowing in Greenwich Village," about a young couple, Joan and Richard Maple, at the beginning of their marriage. Over the next two decades, he returned to these characters again and again, tracing their years together raising children, finding and losing moments of romantic rapport, and facing the heartbreak of infidelity and estrangement. Now these stories appear in a single volume in hardcover for the first time, with the addition of a later story, "Grandparenting," which returns us to the Maples long after their wrenching divorce. Together, The Maples Stories offers a nuanced portrait of a flawed marriage between two sympathetic, well-intentioned practitioners of twentieth-century family life.

2 editions

isa reviewed The Maples Stories by John Updike

A raw glimpse at a failed marriage

4 stars

Content warning Spoilers

I commented on this book saying, "How did you even get together in the first place?" Joan and Richard are certainly a pair together and it was an obvious mismatch from the beginning. This obviously makes for a great story.

John Updike wrote these characters wonderfully. Perhaps it's because of his first hand knowledge from his own failed marriage. But Joan and Richard know each other so well but they do not use it to better the relationship, in fact, they do the opposite.

The thing I loved the most about this is at the end, they end up marrying different people. The people they marry are not perfect. Updike still shows how human the newly chosen spouses are (maybe he even exaggerated). You would think after such a terrible marriage, they would search for something more than just better. But there is no such thing as a perfect person.

Subjects

Married people -- United States -- Fiction