Punch Lines TRUST ME

By R.Z. Sheppard

Except for a gent who has had a stroke and two senior citizens with cancer, most of the protagonists in this collection of short stories suffer from Updike's disease. By now readers should be familiar with the symptoms: a wistful feeling of dislocation from the things and relationships of routine life, and chronic elevator stomach, as if the Fall from Grace were a perpetual state of being. Updike's afflicted are invariably middle-aged, middle-class males who, with their wives, ex-wives, mistresses, natural and acquired children, seem to inhabit a blue version of the Lands' End catalog. Alcohol abuse, infidelity and a numbing lack of faith lie just beneath the bright madras and sturdy poplin.

The men in Trust Me tend to view the women as bovine or witchy, though essential in either case. One husband "could not know the world unless a woman translated it for him." It is generally a small world that the couples and the uncoupled inhabit in these stories. Most are set in the New England exurbs whose historical and residential enchantments are mainstays of Updike's magic kit. An exception is The Ideal Village, about a party of gringo fact finders in the jungle settlement of a sect of Central American social visionaries. The story is to the others in the book what The Coup is to Updike's other novels, a public variation on the folly of private utopias. Concludes the narrator: "It was not until weeks afterwards, collating our diaries in the course of preparing our report to the government, that we discovered how happy each of us had been to leave. Man was not meant to abide in paradise."

Neither were his children, whose flights from home are cause for empty-nest humor. There is, for example, the irony of a successful junk sculptor sourly contemplating the marginal occupations of his offspring: a daughter who molds clay "pinch pots" in California; another who edits a genealogy journal in Cincinnati and is writing a "highly ambitious feminist novel called Ever Since Eve." One son makes mobiles, "unrequested by the world," while his brother tries to crack the Manhattan film world of "lost young souls stoned on media, pounding the sidewalks and virtually (who knows? -- maybe actually) selling their bodies for the whisper of a promise of becoming an assistant grip's assistant in a public-television documentary on the African killer bee."

The weakest parts of the collection are diffused by sociology and demographic shorthand: a smoothly flowing resume substituting for characterization; the itemized contents of a lost wallet, including credit cards, club memberships and photographs, heavily making the point that the seat of the owner's identity is his hip pocket. A story that begins "Though I was between marriages for several years, in a disarray that preoccupied me completely, other people continued to live and to die" sends the eye skidding down the page in search of traction.

But elsewhere, Updike displays the shapeliness and poetic perception that make him a master of this demanding form. More Stately Mansions is balanced on two provocative images, a cross section of a nautilus shell and a big Victorian house, "with all its rooms and this naked freckled woman waiting in one of its chambers." The story itself has the nacreous quality of an old memory; the narrator, a biology teacher in a declining New England mill town, recalls his affair with a California woman who is married to the city's last factory owner. The period is the early '70s with its antiwar politics, new feminists, ecology, astrology and unrevocable sexual license.

The wantonness of nature and the consequences of betrayal are undercurrent themes of this collection, which begins with a father luring his toddler son into a pool with the promise of catching him, and then allowing the boy to sink or swim. The name of this story is Trust Me, a title that then echoes brightly through the rest of the book like the sardonic punch line of a locker-room joke.