Literary critic Jane Barnes places the Maple stories as among the most accomplished of Updike’s literary career:
“Too Far to Go collects all the Maple stories, the first of which was written in 1956. None of them suffers from the stylistic excesses that mark other stories —as if the Maple series were the best stories from any given stage in Updike’s developing perception…Updike has written many stories about the insight of that stage, but the Maple stories represent his most polished statement.”[5]
Barnes continues: “Because of the purity and sureness of the writing, the Maple stories are a clear medium for the narrator’s moral dilemma. The medium is rendered clearer still by the fact that the Maples’ experience is considered all by itself, in terms of Richard and Joan and their children.[6]
Literary critic Richard Detwieler considers the central theme of the volume “the dissolution of a marriage and the varieties of attendant suffering.”[7]
