Mastering the Short Story

...Jayne Ann Phillips' volume of short stories, Black Tickets (Delta/Seymour Lawrence, 265 pp., $8.95), comes garlanded with quotes about its author's "early genius" and its "crooked beauty...

...Nevada"-first published in Playboy-Also demonstrates that this writer is capable of more than a resigned invocation of domesticated libido...

...everything-children, wives, ex-wives, egg-races, sex, conversations-tends to get drenched in the pale-gold light of nostalgia: "Walking these streets, Ferguson saw how right Shakespeare was: life is a matter of stages...

...1934") Many physical details seem to be conjured up merely to provide an opportunity for pretty fussing: "They all had moles near their lips, dark little pigments ignored and sexual...

...Guilt, for instance, is a topic that nestles inside his daz-zlingly-wrought sentences: "A guilt-gem is a piece of the world that has volunteered for compression...

...I do,' he said, 'but it's full of little girls.' She reached for his bourbon and sipped and said, in a voice older than her figure, 'This place is lousy with rooms.'" My favorite piece, "The Man Who Loved Extinct Mammals," features Sapers, who sits around reading about fossil mammals...

...When a mammal's body gets too hot...

...If it weren't for them we'd have starved because my father was crazy...

...The dark spots rose like tiny scarabs on their faces...

...My mother was twenty-eight, my father fifty, my grandmother sixty-two...

...She was taking her time in the bathroom...

...He is interrupted by a phone call from his ex-wife (there she is again) who begins crying: "He tried to follow her reasoning but gathered only the shadowy impression that she loved him, which he felt to be a false impression from previous field work as her husband...

...Later, when Culp is propositioned by an off-duty waitress, their short exchange perfectly captures the half-raunchy, half-homey key in which the story is played: " 'You've a room?' As she asked him that, her jaw went square: Mrs...

...First it is his mistress, then his ex-wife calling back and finally his mother, who wants to know if Sapers ever goes to church...

...The phone keeps ringing...

...Gemerack") Most of the metaphors lack what William Gass once called "figurative commitment...

...This is a witty and touching story, one that only Updike, with his delight in the bric-a-brac of knowledge, could have written...

...who needs it...

...There goes the infant in his carriage, lulled by the swaying, and there goes the schoolboy, slouching with bare legs and baseball hat down an alley toward a playground and one more game amid the long shadows...

...Those souls around us, living our lives with us, are gaseous clouds of being awaiting a condensation and preservation-faces, lights that glimmer out, somehow not seized, save in this gesture of remorse...

...The Egg Race") Like Cheever, Updike is a sucker for poignancy...

...Lacking the sacramental attitude that often cloys Updike's descriptions of sex, the story has a grainy candor that renders both the situation and the characters in it startlingly life-like: "She gathered some clothes and he regretted afterwards that he had not pressed into his memory those last poses of her naked body...

...The only other woman I knew who went barefoot everywhere was my wife...

...She was to him as Gretel to Hansel, a kindred creature moving beside him down a path while birds behind them ate the bread crumbs...

...From the Journal of a Leper") Although separation and divorce figure in many of the stories, remarkably little acrimony is engendered...

...Perhaps if I had not been expecting so much I would not have felt so grievously let down by this reputed eminence jeune...

...but here, looking for a coaster, he saw only an ashtray...

...Snow") Another story begins like a parody of any one of a number of Southern Gothic writers: "In 19341 was seven years old...

...At home he was hyperconscious of wine-glass and water stains on furniture...

...With one or two exceptions, I find these stories to be artsy, derivative and unconvincing...

...For one thing, Updike remains our most unabashedly heterosexual writer, revelling in the femaleness of women at a time when the sexes are portrayed as approximating rather than complementing each other...

...A hair is a specialized scale...

...I thought to myself, Goes into the cellar barefoot-that's great...

...They simply and baldly call attention to themselves: "Kale had a vision of (he park at night, totally empty, wind weaving heavily through the trees and children's playthings like a great black fish about to surface...

...It received, too, a gushing review from John Irving several weeks ago in the Sunday Times Book Review...

...The older daughter, Laura, is brittle beyond her years: "If she and 1 live together," she complains about her mother, "it'll always be competing, that's how it was in Reno...

...where the voice is direct and pure and the subject is her own...

...Yin and Yang, mutually feeding...

...He had set her free, free from fault...

...There is, in fact, something curiously closed about his vision...

...His stories seem to begin at a well-constructed distance from the immediacy of the emotion-hurt, anger or sorrow-that generated them...

...Careening down midnight streets in her mother's long silk scarf, his body was a luminous black...

...Delicately he pulled off the condom and held it, pendulous, while debating where to set it...

...Phillips recounts their stories with a studied, infinitely irritating mixture of street language and blowzy writing-class prose: "She stole money for him...

...When I get to forty, I'm going to tell my lover to shoot me...

...They are what hurt...

...No longer: he had set her adrift from omnipotence...

...In Problems (Knopf, 260 pp., $10.00), his fifth collection and his first in seven years, Updike once again demonstrates how circumscribed his world is and how good he is within its limits...

...In "Here Come the Maples," Richard Maple appreciates his wife, Joan, most fully as he is driving her to divorce court: "All those years, he had blamed her for everything-for the traffic jam in Central Square, for the blasts of noise on the mail boat, for the difference in the levels of their beds...

...Tod is the quintessential Updike figure, loyal to the past he has abandoned for a present that is experienced as inexplicably lacking...

...In another story called (with a sly dig at the psychiatric profession) "The Fairy Godfathers," Tod is constantly reminded of his first wife, Lulu, by his second, Pumpkin: "The first time I was vividly conscious of wanting to, you know, have her," Tod explains to Oz, his psychiatrist, "I had dropped over at their house on a Saturday afternoon to return a set of ratchet wrenches of Roger's I had borrowed, and while I was standing there in the hall she came up from the cellar in bare feet...

...We had cows, some chickens...

...The very mastery of it insures order, guarding certain subjects and keeping others out...

...but in those days, forty years ago, even town people had some land, barns in back...

...Interestingly, "Transaction" was originally published in Oui, a makeshift home away from Updike's usual patrician home at the New Yorker, it made me wonder whether he would do well to exercise some of his less finely-spun gifts more often than he does...

...her breasts drift in their starched carapace inches from my nose...

...Of course, Sapers thought...

...Ferguson had been there, he could still taste those dusty, infinite afternoons...

...They shot up in moss-walled bathrooms, blunt needle sinking like a nail's foot while jet-haired Catholic whores called from doorways...

...The Powder of the Angels, and I'm Yours") Sometimes she sounds like Gertrude Stein: "It was spring it was raining it was the ambulance almost pretty in the dark...

...Culp has driven to Reno to pick up his daughters, ages 11 and 16, to help expedite proceedings for his ex-wife's remarriage...

...there is, instead, a surfeit of tenderness toward the wife who is being left, as if to atone for the failure of intimacy that led to the parting in the first place...

...Morgan in a younger version...

...each hair lifts up so the air can reach the skin...

...He returns, considerably flagged, to intriguing evolutionary details: "'Feet and teeth provide us with most of our information about an extinct mammal's mode of existence...

...I imagine him writing them almost in his sleep, determined to retain a scrap of dream even as he dreams it...

...We lived in a big falling house in the center of town...

...There are many portraits of those who walk on the wild side-strippers, hookers, pimps, nymphomaniacs, drug-dealers, and the generally crazy...

...Souvenir") Someone should tell Jayne Anne Phillips to strain less for "crooked beauty" and write more stories about family life and other bourgeois tribulations, such as "Home" and "The Heavenly Animal...

...Guilt-Gems") Crisis and tumult, on the other hand, are topics that are indirectly shut out by Updike's unremittingly attentive and courteous language...

...I want to suck them, to counteract the outward flow of my blood...

...Removing the matches, he laid the sheath in it...

...For his mouth biting her fingers as he slapped her hips and ground against her...

...He goes back to the reassuring presence of facts: "Mammae, he read, are specialized sweat glands...

...Bellington, Virginia, was a Depression town...

...Updike's style-his finicky choice of words, his love of adjectives-is a linguistic fence...

...Several tales here cover what is for Updike new geography: "Transaction" narrates an encounter between a reluctant prostitute and a family man who is prepared for an evening of abandon...

...Still, there is more to praise in this collection than to complain of...

...somewhere along the way all of his stories evoke that sense of "irrecoverable loss," even when the source of the feeling isn't entirely clear...