Collection: Too Far to Go

Overview
Too Far to Go collects John Updike's sustained, compassionate examination of a single marriage across time. Rather than a single novel, the book threads together linked episodes that follow Richard and Joan Maple from small domestic satisfactions through infidelities, arguments, and the slow, inexorable loosening of their bond. The result reads like a series of intimate snapshots that, taken together, form a panoramic study of love's erosion in a particular social world.
Updike moves through years with a novelist's eye for scene and a poet's ear for cadence, making ordinary objects and moments carry emotional weight. The narrative neither villainizes nor exalts its protagonists; instead it watches them with precise, often unsparing attention as they respond to boredom, desire, pride, and shame.

Plot and Characters
Richard Maple is an ordinary, literate American husband whose interior life and petty resentments are rendered with careful specificity. Joan is alternately affectionate, exasperated, and proud, her frustrations and small rebellions sketched with sympathy. The stories follow their courtship traces into domestic routines, then through separations, affairs, legal disentanglements, and the awkward gestures of post-marital life.
The couple's children and the surrounding suburban acquaintances form a background hum that highlights the Maples' private crises. Episodes shift focus between moments of tenderness, a remembered intimacy, a rare compromise, and scenes of rupture, such as confrontations or admissions of infidelity. The chronology is episodic rather than strictly linear, assembling a sense of duration and loss rather than a single climactic event.

Themes
The book probes the endurance and limits of marriage, especially within the midcentury American middle class. Intimacy and alienation sit side by side: sexual desire alternates with boredom, compassion with contempt, and fidelity with detours toward consolation. Updike explores how material comforts, social expectations, and private dissatisfaction conspire to fray a relationship that once seemed secure.
Identity and self-deception recur as motifs. Both Richard and Joan maintain narratives about themselves that collide with reality; they perform roles, husband, wife, homemaker, intellectual, that begin to feel constraining. Loneliness, even when shared under the same roof, emerges as a central human predicament, and Updike treats it with both irony and tenderness.

Style and Structure
Updike's prose is supple and observant, combining meticulous description with flashes of lyricism. He frequently employs close third-person perspective and free indirect discourse to inhabit both spouses' minds, granting readers access to private thoughts without reducing characters to caricature. Everyday scenes, dinner tables, bedrooms, driving routes, become arenas where mood and meaning shift subtly.
The linked-episode structure allows momentum without forcing artificial unity; recurring images and conversational echoes create cohesion. Dialogue is plainspoken and revealing, while interior narration supplies the psychological texture that turns small moments into defining ones. The book's pacing mirrors the gradual nature of marital decline: slow, accumulative, punctuated by sudden sharp realizations.

Significance
Too Far to Go stands as one of Updike's most humane and unflinching portraits of domestic life. It helped cement his reputation for rendering suburban America with moral seriousness and stylistic acuity. The collection's quiet intensity owes less to melodrama than to its insistence on detail and its refusal to simplify motives.
Readers often respond to its mixture of sympathy and critique: the Maples are neither saintly nor monstrous, and that ambiguity gives the stories their power. The book endures as a study of ordinary characters facing ordinary failures, written with a clarity that makes their struggles feel both particular and universal.