Title aside, “Licks of Love” is a touching, elegiac collection of stories about infidelity, about the weight of family, about the dwindling of years, about the heart and other organs. The stories are largely set in the Pennsylvania of Updike’s youth, and familiar faces are everywhere. There’s the writer’s neurotic alter ego, the novelist Henry Bech, who becomes increasingly unnerved as women he’s bedded start turning up at his readings. There’s even the ghost of Harry (Rabbit) Angstrom, now dead 10 years. At the outset of the new story, “Rabbit Remembered,” a middle-aged nurse knocks on Harry’s widow’s door and announces that she is Harry’s love child. Chaos ensues. Even dead, Harry knows how to make a scene.
Updike is a resolutely old-fashioned writer–the narrator of one story calls himself a “silver-haired antique-dealer,” which feels like a nudge and a wink–and he works so slowly and carefully that you rarely see the emotional punches coming. What’s more, his prose is simpler and purer than usual, his intellect as voracious as ever. One of the incidental pleasures of “Rabbit Remembered” is the banter about “American Beauty” and the Clintons’ marriage. The movie and the marriage, of course, are like pages out of Updike. If the world never changes, why should he?
