John Updike is an éminence grise of the short-story form. I imagine him writing them almost in his sleep, determined to retain a scrap of dream even as he dreams it. In Problems … Updike once again demonstrates how circumscribed his world is and how good he is within its limits.

Updike's style—his finicky choice of words, his love of adjectives—is a linguistic fence. The very mastery of it insures order, guarding certain subjects and keeping others out. Guilt, for instance, is a topic that nestles inside his dazzlingly-wrought sentences: "A guilt-gem is a piece of the world that has volunteered for compression. 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." ("Guilt-Gems") Crisis and tumult, on the other hand, are topics that...