John Updike's Fight With Plato

"Plato was wrong," John Updike writes toward the end of one of his short stories, "what is is absolute. Ideas pale." Updike's prose is rarely pale in the two-volume edition of his short stories recently published by the Library of America. It chases after physical objects more often than ideas, capturing a resplendent vision of creation's praise. Indeed, despite the timespan these stories cover—from 1953 to 2008—and their immersion in the changing social mores and material commonplaces of the American middle class, they astound most in the persistence of their praise. "So: be joyful" one story directly admonishes, and the rest quickly step in line. This dependable contentment renders these momentous volumes, though bound in tight cloth with a ribbon marker and sheer, crinkly pages, affectionately companionable. When Updike described a golden retriever as "endlessly amiable," "as if life were a steady hail of blessings," I reached to scratch the book behind the ears, so accustomed had I become to its own panting cheerfulness.