During his college years John Updike was a graphic artist, especially adept as a cartoonist and draftsman, and this very literal sense of style has been the most distinguishing factor in his novels and stories. He is a master of the well-crafted sentence, composed of words often as interesting for their sound and physical texture as for the ideas they convey. But unlike some of his more innovative contemporaries (Barthelme, Sukenick, Major) who occasionally focus on language alone, Updike keeps a sense of story in his works. His reputation was built in the New Yorker magazine, and his short fictions of the 1950s, 1960s, and 1970s chart the fortunes of two major geographical groups among whom Updike has lived: the small-town folk of eastern Pennsylvania and the urban and suburban populace of New York City and New England. His novels often attend to the relationships between lovers but...