Most of the men in John Updike's The Afterlife and Other Stories, a collection of 22 short stories, are in their 60s. At this stage of life, they seem cut off from the vitalities of work and sexual pleasure. They travel abroad, pick at their memories, and circle cautiously around death. Time has worn away at their energy and left them somewhat displaced and invisible.
Several of the protagonists are men trying to come to terms with their deceased mothers. Joey in "A Sandstone Farm" rummages through his mother's college yearbook and tries to sort out his conflicted feelings about her. The man in "His Mother Inside Him" gets caught up in a reverie: "When his mother died, he became the sole custodian of hundreds of small mental pictures."
Other characters in these stories visit places from their past and find themselves taking stock of their lives. Updike's men also think about death. In "Playing with Dynamite," a character realizes that "living in death's immediate neighborhood, he was developing a soldier's jaunty indifference." Not so for the recently divorced Martin Fredericks in "The Journey to the Dead." He is devastated by the loss of his wife and by his encounters with Arlene Quint, a cancer-stricken friend. In her presence all he wants to do is flee. Updike renders all these stories from the far country of aging with great style and understanding.