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Title: A bit dull by anyone's standards
Review: I only liked maybe two or three stories in this entire collection. The rest were pretty timid and uneventful, as though Updike were afraid of getting his hands dirty and immersing himself in the flesh and bone realities of life and narrative. This hesitation to actually "go for it" is a hallmark of all of Updike's fiction in my opinion, which leaves all of his stories devoid of what you might call narrative vitality, or realness. It is this distance between Updike and what he's writing about that leads the reader to believe that Updike is not writing a story but merely philosophizing about one. Updike's pompous abstractions inevitably deprive these stories of a vigour that they might otherwise have.
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