Narrator Des had a fierce clinical depression in the mid-1970s and his treatment in a Dublin mental hospital is one of the few anchored points around which all other thematic flotsam washes. Instead of plot we get a kind of narrative jet-lag, shuttling hectically between the narrator's favourite travel destinations over two decades of restless migration. This sort of thing usually means (a) you can whistle for a plot- line and (b) you may have to suspend normal brain function to get on the author's wave-length Well (a) certainly does apply here. The individual perishes, the collective endures: the message is neither new nor original, but it has rarely been as effortlessly or as movingly expressed.. EVEN when it involves eloquent Irishmen, I confess my heart sinks to see a blurb-line such as this book's: "composed from a series of intense, almost poetical fragments, reflecting the scattered nature of the writer's life". He had come to see that the heart, like a rubber ball, loses bounce, and eventually goes dead." The other occurs at the end, when the hoard of photographs which the dead Carlyle insisted on taking at the family get-togethers he insisted upon organising "were revealed to Fred as priceless - treasure, stored up against the winter that had arrived". Two passages from it encapsulate the emotional parameters of the entire book.

Looking back on an old affair, Fred reflects that "he would never love anyone that much again. The story is eventually revealed to be one of mistaken identity, but meanwhile the tremor has revealed structural flaws in the couple's relationship - as always, Updike's grip on sexual politics is incomparable - and, more surprisingly, the husband has been forced to confront the reality of his long-repressed homosexual impulses."Brother Grasshopper" is an account of the lifelong relationship between Fred Emmet, a rather weedy only child, and his hearty, convivial brother- in-law Carlyle. In "The Rumour", a marriage is perturbed by gossip about the husband having a same-sex affair. Two of these centre on the retrospective reassessment of relationships long taken for granted.

If Updike's squibs would draw oohs and aahs in any less sumptuous display, at least half a dozen titles here - an excellent hit-rate in this exacting form - are as good as anything he has ever done. who claimed to be related to him, and he was flattered by their mannerly attentions, but he secretly doubted the reality of the connection."But such reservations are the in-evitable result of judging these stories by the standards set by the best of them. "Farrell's Caddie", in which an American golfer receives oracular advice from his caddie at the Royal Caledonian, provides some much-needed light relief, but in a disconcertingly arch vein of New Yorkerish whimsy. In "Playing with Dynamite" Updike comes close to self-parody:"He could scarcely distinguish his stepchildren from his children by his own former marriage, or tell kin from spouses. He was polite to all these tan, bouncy, smooth-skinned, sure-footed, well-dressed young adults ...