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 morning’s paper brings news of lost Atlantises.
- ISBN10 0449211037
- ISBN13 9780449211038
- Publish Date 12 December 1985
- Publish Status Out of Stock
- Publish Country US
- Publisher Random House USA Inc
- Imprint Fawcett
- Format Paperback (US Mass Market)
- Pages 288
- Language English
- URL https://penguinrandomhouse.com/books/isbn/9780449211038