Reception
"Sex is recalled like a delirium after the fever has passed. Updike's men try to remember the visions love brought to them, but the only solid evidence is the debris littering the sickbed: children, ex-wives, divided property, self-distrust, regret. Death, on the contrary, is close and real, though often oddly reassuring in its approach." —Literary critic Micheal Harris in Facing the Realities of Aging, Death: The Afterlife and Other Stories, The Los Angeles Times , November 14, 1994. [7]
Jay Parini of The New York Times offers a mixed appraisal of the collection, describing Updike's style as "fluent to a fault, rich in metaphor, rising to exquisite heights in places, toppling elsewhere into preciousness and affectation." Parini adds: "John Updike has rarely written more affectingly, more from the center of his being. Several of these stories will, I suspect, enjoy the kind of afterlife granted to few writers in any time or place." [8]
Michael Harris of The Los Angeles Times declares that Updike's literary prowess undiminished in this collection:
We have come to take his stylistic brilliance and structural ingenuity for granted, and some of his habitual gestures—the Greek mythology, the swatches of travelog, the cool, brittle encounters between lovers—seem like tics." [9]
In her work on Updike, Biljana Dojčinović has argued that his short story collection The Afterlife and Other Stories is a pivotal work that demonstrates a change in his writing on feminism. [10]
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