The last line in the last story, “The Full Glass,” of Updike’s last collection of short stories: “If I can read this strange old guy’s mind aright, he’s drinking a toast to the visible world, his impending disappearance from it be damned.” After Updike’s recent death, you can’t help reading this last gasp with an added poignancy. So we toast him now and all the pleasure he’s given us, born anew in these stories of age and decline.

We’re back in Updike territory, the white middle- and upper-middle classes of financiers, teachers, adulterers, wives, divorces, travels — here to Morocco, Spain and India — and suburban landscapes with that nostalgic aura of yesteryear: “We had the best of it. No drugs, no gangs, no school shootings, respect for our teachers, and faith in America.”

Updike’s own autobiographical memories saturate these various tales, many of which blend into one another, permeated by his rural upbringing in Pennsylvania, when his family was “exiled” to his grandparents’ farm during the Depression and from which he escaped to Harvard, The New Yorker and beyond. Updike lovingly and with the eye of the lyric poet conjures up old garages, gardens, chicken coops, trolley cars, ice boxes, characters, houses and alleys in an elegiac mood laced with melancholy and loss.

In “My Father’s Tears” he remembers departing for college from a long-gone railroad station. He re-creates the horrors of 9/11 from several angles in “Varieties of Religious Experience” and returns to the farm in “The Road Home.” The characters’ names change, but you know it’s Updike with the adultery, the divorces and the grown children. His sensibility is like the light from a laser with the usual clash of calm and catastrophe.

Mothers hover over and haunt this collection, clearly portraits of Updike’s own: easy to anger, disappointed, at times merciful but more ominous: “He saw his mother as the dispenser of more truth than he could bear.” “She loomed to him less as another person than as an overarching weather. . . . with such a mother he can never be an ordinary, every-day boy.” The pleasant but ineffectual father plods off to teach school each morning, trying to make ends meet.

But it’s the abundant details we remember, the objects and angles, the shadows and light, freighted with memory and loss like such things in our childhood homes: “These objects had been with him in the abyss of lost time, and survived less altered than he. What did they mean? They had to mean something . . .” They register the abundance of the world around us, luminous in their own mysterious rites, allied to us in strange and insinuating ways. To pile them up, caress and assess them as Updike does, is a stunning feat of craftsmanship and vision.

I always remember Updike’s characters as opaque, creatures of shifting moods and motions, insubstantial for the most part, emotional barometers of sex and survival, mired in meticulous manners, experiencing minor epiphanies. But the images sing and erupt on the page like shards of incandescent light. They are Updike’s antidote to death. And, because of him, ours as well.

samcoale@cox.net