On “Problems And Other Stories”

Posted: July 17th, 2010 | Author: | Filed under: Uncategorized | Tags: , | No Comments »

Some years ago, when a friend showed me John Updike’s short story “Problems,” I loved it. The protagonist has left one woman for another, and he isn’t quite sure he made the right decision. His angst is presented as a series of math story problems. In what’s literally the final analysis, the narrator/test writer tallies up all the hero’s reasons to be happy, and then surprises the reader by asking: “Something is wrong. What is it?”

I shuddered again when I read that line, after all these years, having remembered only that, but forgotten the title and the author, having written to the friend who showed me the story in hope he would remember, having ordered a used hardback on Amazon and made my way through to the book until I got to the title story, the best of the bunch by far.

No doubt, more than enough criticism has been scribbled on everything Updike has written. And yet, for reasons that I’ll explain, I think it might be worthwhile to have a record of what it was like for a thirty-nine year old childless bachelor to read these stories in 2010.

I’m a big fan of Updike, mainly because of The Centuar, his surreal, semi-mythical novel of father/son dynamics. Although the human characters clearly occupy a certain time and place, their mythical counterparts rise above the issues of the day and express them as universal, timeless ideas. “Problems,” too (the individual story) uses its odd structure to transcend its deliberately banal suburban details, such as the amount of pea stone most suitable for giving the proper texture to a driveway. After all, the problems in “problems” are there to illuminate more general ideas.

Although I had little else in common with the character in “Problems,” I know well what it’s like to leave someone, to know that logically it was the right thing to do, and yet to feel ongoing, inescapable regret, and to deal with the depressing realization that the criteria are for making the correct decision in such cases are elusive, changeable, and perhaps nonexistent.

And yet, I felt quite distant from the rest of the stories in the collection. Many of Updike’s characters are anxious about the very idea of divorce, a point of view that has surely had its day in mainstream America. From “Here Come The Maples,” in which a man goes to the courthouse to get the paperwork necessary for his no-fault divorce:

His knees trembled and his stomach churned at the enormity of what he was doing. He turned a corner. A grandmotherly woman reigned within a spacious, idle territory of green-topped desks and great ledgers in steel racks. “Could I get a c-copy of a marriage license?” he asked her.

There are twenty-two stories in the volume, and they are nearly all about the same thing: a man leaves a woman and regrets it. And yet, it’s obvious that, to Updike, the more serious sin isn’t leaving the woman, it’s disrupting the natural order of married suburban life. The author struggles to convince us, as he clearly thrashes about in his own guilt, that the end of many first marriages is inevitable, that people grow apart, that – above all – it’s possible for a man to leave, or cheat on, his wife, and to still be a good man.

Here, in “How To Love America And Leave It At The Same Time,” Updike chooses a chummy second-person imperative voice, guiding “you” through the motions of a trip with the child of the wife that “you” have recently left:

Out on the hot pavement, the little girl’s sandals flop. She has been begging for new ones every day. Her hair is still wet from the motel pool. Take her into a shoe store. Solemnly the salesman seats her, measures her foot size. Marvel at the way in which his hand deigns to touch this unknown child’s sticky bare foot. Alas, what he has in her size she does not like, and what she likes he does not have in her size. Express regret and leave. Crossing the dangerous thoroughfare, you take her hand, a touch more tender with her, having witnessed the tenderness of others. Across the street, in a little main square pared to insignificance by successive widenings of the highway, an old covered wagon instead of a statue stands. Think of those dead unknown — plodding flights of angels — who dared cross this land of inhuman grandeur without highways, without air conditioning, without even (a look underneath confirms) shock absorbers, jolting and rattling each inch, in order to arrive here and create this town, wherein this wagon has become a receptacle for (a look inside discovers) empty cans of Coors Beer, Diet Pepsi, and Mountain Dew.

America is a vast conspiracy to make you happy.

So, there is progress over time, but that progress is a sham. Life was hard then, and life is hard now, but now the difficulties are masked with consumer goods.

True enough, and yet, not all progress is a sham. People don’t have to get married in their early twenties. They don’t have to have children. They don’t have to get married at all, even if they do have children. They don’t have to attempt re-consecration of the sacred by marrying the person they cheated with.

There aren’t any men like me in any of these stories, and yet most of the protagonists are about my age. Most of them strike me as nice guys, smart, but a bit naive, a bit sheltered, the sort of guys who take rules far too seriously, so that when they break them, they break themselves. I want to pour them a drink, take them out, loan them some books…

…and yet, all these characters are educated drinkers who have been out plenty. They couldn’t use my help if they had it; they are fatalists, Calvinists, who believe deeply in the seriousness of their own utterly unavoidable sins.

Arguably the second best story in the collection, “Minutes Of The Last Meeting,” is written in the form of a record of a committee that literally has no purpose. The Chairman, who has realized this, attempts to dissolve the committee, or at least extricate himself from it, but finds to his implicit horror that he can do neither:

Mrs. Hepple suggested that a dance or rummage sale be held to raise funds so such a goal might be attacked.

Miss Beane thought that a square dance would be better than a black-tie dance so as to attract young people.

The Chairman moved that the bylaws be amended so as to permit the committee to disband.

No one seconded.

The Chairman, like all the men who have left their wives in the other stories, is trapped within a system of rules from which there is an escape. But he won’t take it, because that would be against the rules of the system. He’s a bit like The Prisoner of the classic British TV show, except that, instead of trying to escape, he just continually re-negotiates the terms of his captivity.

Image cropped from one found in The Village Voice.