Updike

One of my favourite short stories, probably my favourite, is "The Country Husband" by John Cheever but coming up close behind it is "The Other Woman" by John Updike. Both are stories of distressed people living in modern America; but while the central character in the Cheever story is the distressed if not neurotic one, the distressed person in the Updike story is not the central character, the husband who discovers that his wife is having an affair with a bloke who lives nearby; no, it's the wife of that man who suffers most. It's a brilliant story because it highlights a tragedy without looking at it from a tragic viewpoint - the main character is actually pleased that his wife has left him.
I shouldn't pretend to be knowledgeable about John Updike bnecause I have only read two complete works by him (apart from some poems and essays): two short stories; I have never got on with his novels. Someone writing in The Spectator recently suggested that he was a greater short story writer than a novelist because he did not have the space to show off his love of words, that he had to pare things down as the short story form requires.
I never was able to read John O'Hara's most famous novel, "Appointment in Samarra" (some critic whom O'Hara swore he was going to beat up, came up with the phrase "disappoinment in O'Hara" for his next novel) but picked up one of his less well known novels - can't recall the title - and thoroughly enjoyed it. So this is what I am going to do with John Updike: I'm going to try one of his less well known works and see if I'll like it better than "Couples" which I couldn't read at all. I have ordered from the local library a novel called "Memories of the Ford administration". With a title like that it surely has to be good. What publisher would accept it if it was not good because he certainly wouldn't sell it with that title alone.