In one of John Updike’s early stories, the narrator urges us to contemplate his dead grandmother’s thimble.1 Moving through a dark house, heading downstairs, he upends a sewing basket left on the landing. The moment’s dislocation encourages one of Updike’s greatest strengths, his flair for simile and metaphor. Retrieving the thimble from the floor, briefly uncertain what it is, he describes it as a “stemless chalice of silver weighing a fraction of an ounce.” The metaphor’s religious overtones are brightly suited to his succeeding sensations: “the valves of time parted, and after an interval of years my grandmother was upon me again, and it seemed incumbent upon me, necessary and holy, to tell how once there had been a woman who now was no more, how she had been born and lived in a world that had ceased to exist.” He is inviting us to partake in one of literature’s mystical rites—to drink deep and slake our souls from a chalice smaller, lighter than a tulip.

Updike was still in his twenties when he wrote these words, which appear in a story that bore, I suppose, the lengthiest title of any piece of fiction he ever published: “The Blessed Man of Boston, My Grandmother’s Thimble, and Fanning Island.” The young writer had already received, or was soon to receive, a host of propitious honors: a summa cum laude undergraduate degree from Harvard; employment at The New Yorker; book publication in three different genres (novel,