Trust Me

Short Stories

By: John Updike

Narrated by: John Updike

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. Love pangs, a favorite subject of the author, take on a new urgency as earthquakes, illnesses, lost wallets, and deaths of distant friends besiege his aging heroes and heroines. One man loves his wife’s twin, and several men love the imagined bliss of their pasts; one woman takes an impotent lover, and another must administer her father’s death. Bourgeois comforts and youthful convictions are tenderly seen as certain to erode: “Man,” as one of these stories concludes, “was not meant to abide in paradise.”

Critic reviews

“The plainest of objects and events bloom in these stories as if they had at last found their proper climate. . . . I find myself searching for language to describe the very palpable pleasure that comes with experiencing in a writer authority and also humor and elegance and honesty and generosity of spirit.”—Marilynne Robinson, The New York Times Book Review

“It is in his short stories that we find Updike’s most assured work. . . . And almost without fail they give pleasure, a quality not to be taken lightly.”—The Washington Post Book World

“Dazzling . . . We certainly can trust him—we are in very good hands.”—The New York Times