Problems and Other Stories

About this book

In this midcareer collection of twenty-three short stories John Updike tackles such problems as separation divorce and remarriage parents and children guns and prostitution leprosy swooning suffocation and guilt. His self-seeking heroes tend to be forty; his heroines are asleep seductive longing or reproachful. None of these characters is innocent and all are looking vainly for the road back to an imagined Paradise. Pain and comedy closely coexist in this mainly domestic world of the 1970s where life is indistinguishable from a television commercial (but what is it advertising?) and every mornings paper brings news of lost Atlantises.