Cool, Coo! World

THE SAME DOOR [241 pp.)--John Updike--Knopf ($3.75).

Short-Storyteller and Novelist (The Poor house Fair) John Updike likes to give his characters barium breakfasts. As they swallow life's little ironies or surprises, he puts his literary X-ray machine to work photographing the newly revealed conformations and deformations of man. In this collection of 16 short stories, Author Updike's plots vary--they may turn on a boy's whistle, a bachelor girl's bed, a bottle of wine--but the personality changes that result share the kinship of human nature well-observed.

In Tomorrow and Tomorrow and So Forth, a male high-school teacher is drawn into an unconscious rivalry with a bright boy in the class over the prettiest girl. When the teacher intercepts a soppy note written by the girl saying that she loves him, he is touched and elated. His joy is short-lived. It turns out that the bright boy has coached the girl to guy all the male teachers with the same note. Friends from Philadelphia gives a self-made man with culture gnawing at his pride the chance to score off his Ivy elitenik neighbors with a bottle of Mouton-Rothschild 1937. One of the best stories in the book, Who Made Yellow Roses Yellow?, might draw a bravo from Marquand for its social surgery. At college, blueblooded Fred had got socially iffy Clayton into the best clubs. Years later, with the hourglass of fortune reversed, Fred needs work and Clayton is an advertising bigwig. At a sanctimonious lunch full of bogus bonhomie, Clayton offers Fred no job. and all but admits that one of his greatest pleasures is watching the mighty campus idols of old crash at his well-shod feet.

At 27, John Updike is an unusually gifted writer. His descriptions are fresh and evocative, his epigrams have flair, and his sense of the fashions of the times is unerring (he with a job in media and she with Scandinavian tastes, favoring natural wood and natural childbirth''). Unfortunately. Author Updike plays his talents cool; his passion for understatement seems to rule out all passion.

This file is automatically generated by a robot program, so reader's discretion is required.