The closing lines of the final story in John Updike’s last book, My Father’s Tears, describe a man in his late seventies raising the glass of water he uses to wash down his nightly medication — his cholesterol-lowering pill, the anti-inflammatory one, his sleeping pill, his calcium supplement — in a toast “to the visible world, his impending disappearance from it be damned”. It’s an image that perfectly epitomises Updike’s stance — at once melancholy and celebratory — in this magnificent collection that appears just months after his death, at 76, this January.

Mortality has overhung Updike’s work for some time. As far back as 1990, Rabbit at Rest graphically charted the cardiac calamities that dispatched Harry Angstrom, about whom he had been producing fictional bulletins every decade since Rabbit, Run in 1960. The Afterlife (1994) trained his gleamingly sharp focus on the desolations and consolations of late middle age and old age. Licks of Love (2002) looked yearningly back at the hedonist excitements of the 1960s and 1970s from a present-day vantage point of closeness to death.

Endpoint, a sequence of poems by Updike published shortly before My Father’s Tears, puts you alongside him with particular intimacy as he moves through his seventies, “that decade in which,/I’m told, most people die”. Verses written on each of his birthdays from 2002 to 2008 chronicle the inroads of ageing: waning physical powers and — especially alarming to this master of memory — moments of blank forgetfulness. Later poems report on his hospitalisation in Boston at the end of 2008 and the biopsy that conclusively dashed any hopes of his recovery from cancer. All of this is done with a mannerly but unillusioned stoicism that makes these works deeply affecting exercises in gracefully cadenced candour. Equally elegant and eloquent, the poems that accompany them — on Updike’s parents, foreign travel, paintings, the natural world, Doris Day, golf and his literary motivations (“A life poured into words — apparent waste / intended to preserve the thing consumed”) — afford further close-quarters insight into the mind and sensibility of America’s outstanding man of letters in the second half of the 20th century.

It’s in My Father’s Tears, though, that his genius can be seen on peak form. Eighteen stories rich in master strokes of social, psychological and emotional nuance display what made him a matchless fictional documenter of small-town and middle-class American life for five decades. In the opening work, a young American couple and their children go on holiday to Morocco to escape the April greyness of England where they are temporarily living. Soon they find themselves even more eager to escape the North Africa around which they blunder.

Crisply evocative and rippling with irony, the story splendidly confirms Updike’s status as a fine successor to Henry James when it comes to portraying Americans abroad. There’s the same vivid rendering of new sights and sensations, the same amused play with the comedy of culture clash and the same awareness of more disruptive elements lurking beneath it. The concluding twist is pure Updike, though. The narrator is seen to be remembering not just a fraught foreign trip but, with pained wistfulness, a long-lost time before his family broke apart.

Fallings apart are much in evidence in the other stories: lightly fictionalised, often semi-autobiographical dispatches from the old-age front. An assiduous frequenter of his high-school class reunions, Updike once revealed, he returns to two of them in stories here. Generational and local ties that had slackened when classmates moved out into marriages and careers are shown to have re-tightened and pulled them back into a kind of defensive camaraderie against the ravages of time.

The class beauty now manoeuvres around with a Zimmer frame. Former sports stars are kitted out with plastic knees and pacemakers. Elsewhere, contemporaries wear “an increasingly frequent expression, that of a slightly deaf person who blames you for not speaking louder”. Disorientations of differing kinds keep being pointed up — from the hazards of negotiating an unfamiliar driving route with slowed reflexes and blurry vision to having to cope with such irksome present-day vagaries as the difficulty of locating “a suitably jocose but not obscene or hostile birthday card”.

Meeting a plump, sardonic woman he doesn’t at first recognise sets one man achingly recalling how he kissed her half a century ago on their way home from a school dance, “her black eyes ­button-bright in the sodium streetlight, amid the restless faint shadows of the half-brown big sycamore leaves”. The sensuous exactness of this cameo and the delicacy with which the teenagers — all their lives before them, they exult — are warningly silhouetted against the already withering foliage exhibit why these stories, for all their often sombre subject matter, are exhilarating. Mortality may shadow them but they glow with imaginative vitality.

Exotic locations toured by affluent retirees are conjured up with ravishing aplomb. But, most of all, it’s everyday existence that Updike burnishes with allure. Nor is it only the here and now that attracts his keen responsiveness. Grieved at life’s transitoriness, he does his best to foil it by exhumations of vanished eras from his, his parents’ or his grandparents’ past. Glinting details vivify these scenes saved from oblivion. In the aptly named Personal Archeology, shards of bottle glass of “nostalgic thickness” (“malt-brown, sea-blue, beryl, amber, a foggy white”) are prised out of a rubbish dump. An old telephone resembles “a thick-stemmed black daffodil of Bakelite”.

One poem in Endpoint ex-presses Updike’s gratitude to his writing hand, that “faithful old/five-fingered beast of burden”. He has never used it to better effect than in My Father’s Tears. With this book, a talent that burnt brightly for half a century goes out in a blaze of brilliance.

My Father's Tears by John Updike
Hamish Hamilton £18.99 pp292

Endpoint by John Updike
Hamish Hamilton £12.99 pp98

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