Perennial Promises Kept

(8 of 10)
Go: The Maples Stories). The Maples move through an intricate arabesque of estrangements and reunit-ings. Richard slowly decides that the only thing worse than parting is staying together. The author says that the Maples' long travail was not simply a transcript of what the Updikes were going through: "A novel should never seem autobiographical to the writer, autobiographical though it may seem to the reader." But many moments in the Maples stories betray a knowledge of pain too recent to disguise. The occasion arrives when Richard must tell his children he is leaving: "The partition between his face and the tears broke. Richard sat down to the celebratory meal with the back of his throat aching; the champagne, the lobster seemed phases of sunshine; he saw them and tasted them through tears.

He blinked, swallowed, croak-ily joked about hay fever. The tears would not stop leaking through."

This troubled house harbored another writer, David Updike, now 25, who has had three stories published in The New Yorker. One, called Apples (1978), poignantly portrays the edginess of an absent father's weekend visits: "He always leaves suddenly, catching us with a bite of dessert left on our plates or a swig of coffee in our mouths, and my mother asking, invariably, why so soon. I sympathize with him, though, and would like to hug him knowing somehow that his sudden departure is not out of any eagerness to return to his apartment in the city but out of the pain it causes him to stay."

Updike took a two-room apartment in Boston in 1974. His writing during this period suggested considerable anguish. The two novels A Month of Sundays (1975) and Marry Me: A Romance (1976) were widely regarded as inferior Updike, self-indulgent and self-lacerating accounts of sex and guilt. Not everyone agrees with these judgments. (One of Updike's virtues is his prolificity; he has produced enough books to fuel arguments of all kinds.) Judith Jones, his editor at Knopf, thinks A Month of Sundays one of his best, precisely because it was written "during the darkest part of Updike's personal journey; it came out of his depressed feelings about the world at the time."

In 1977 he married the recently divorced Martha Bernhard, a few years his junior and a former member of the Updikes' social set in Ipswich. "I was due for a change," he says now, "not only of wives but of setting, of life." His sense of guilt has largely faded. "I still feel that by leaving I did the children a disservice," he says. They are now grown and out on their own. Miranda, 21, works in the photography business in Boston. Michael, 23, is a college student in Wisconsin. Elizabeth, 27, has received a degree from the Rhode Island School of Design. The author encourages David's literary ambitions: "His writing is gentle and sensitive. I'm sure it can't be easy for someone like him to make his own way when he has the name he does." The youngest of Martha's three sons lives with her, an arrangement that pleases Updike: "I enjoyed being the father of young children. Kids are easier to please than adults." Mary, his first wife, has remarried.

The change in Updike's life, for all its attendant pain, was quickly reflected in his fiction. He startled nearly everyone with The Coup (1978), a far cry