Trust Me

By John Updike

Book Overview

The theme of trust, betrayed or fulfilled, runs through this collection of short stories: Parents lead children into peril, husbands abandon wives, wives manipulate husbands, and time undermines all.... This description may be from another edition of this product.

• Format: Hardcover
• Language: English
• ISBN: 0394558332
• ISBN13: 9780394558332
• Release Date: April 1987
• Publisher: Knopf
• Length: 302 Pages
• Weight: 1.07 lbs.

Customer Reviews

AT CHEEVER'S LEVEL

Trust Me shows that Updike deserves his place among the true greats, such as Cheever. Each story in Trust Me works, although some more than others (a few go on longer than they need to). Updike has a fine ear for the malaise of the middle-aged, middle-class man or woman who is mostly past being particularly enthusiastic about life's possibilities. Updike doesn't have contempt for his subjects, but neither does he have a lot of sympathy. This is a beautifully crafted set of short stories. There is often a slyness to the phrases and sentences, such as is found in his classic short story, A & P.

Review of Trust me by John Updike

The audio casset version of this book is outstanding and is read by the author, which is always a great asset. The short stories are artful character studies that vividly describe the souls of your neighbors, your friends, or yourself in a modern setting. The details are so charming you'll want to listen to it over and over to pick up all the nuances.

A Good First Choice for the Updike Reader

Men, women, what works and what does not - this seems to be the central theme of Trust Me. This was my first Updike book and as a collection of short stories, Trust Me represents a wise choice in this regard. The reader gets a taste of the Updike style in several short works which, despite being rich in detail and innuendo, are easily consumable - especially if read from start to finish without any long breaks.

Trust Updike

What, really, can one say against John Updike? Where, in these stories, can he be faulted? Well, the question need not be so rhetorical. One might, for example, consider the charge that his material is relatively unvarying. Time and again in his short stories Updike returns to the same territory: the white, middle-class couple caught up in the flux of an extra-marital affair. This is the central theme of no less than six of these twenty-two tales, but it touches the edges of many of the others too. And of these others all are confined to the same domestic and social milieu - from 'Killing', in which a daughter must cope with her father's death from Alzheimer's Disease, to 'The City', in which a salesman unexpectedly contracts appendicitis while on a business trip. Where is the broader vision - the black characters, the homosexuals, the political radicals? They are absent from Updike's vision. And yet, if this artist paints on a restricted canvas, it is the detail and style of the brushstrokes that redeems his art. 'Trust Me' is as reliable - as trustworthy - a demonstration as any work in the Updike corpus that the man's linguistic style is extraordinary. Central to it is an astonishing facility for metaphor; no less characteristic is his ear for the musical, his faculty for critical analysis, and a taste for symbolism that is at once unobtrusive and yet deeply satisfying. With such an abundance of stylistic gifts all working simultaneously, the unchanging world of Updike's characters remains fresh and, in 'Trust Me', fresher than ever.