We finally derive unified understanding from a revered guardian of American letters. Updike assumes the comforting role of a parent tending to a child shaken by a nightmare: While neither the evil nor its memory goes away, the narrative restores reality and lets us sleep through the night.

Updike’s short story lines up four episodes, all told from a different point of view. The first is from Dan Kellogg, a 63-year-old Cincinnati lawyer who is visiting his daughter in New York at the time of the attack. Like many Americans who witnessed the catastrophe, his values and religious faith are shaken as he struggles to answer questions posed by his precocious granddaughter. The second episode flashes back to a week before Sept. 11 and is set in a Florida strip club, where Mohamed Atta, one of the hijackers, vindictively immerses himself in the pit of Western immorality and corruption.

The third episode jumps forward to a dizzying recreation of the absurd, improbable collapse of the world’s largest buildings, as physically felt and intellectually fathomed by a bond trader on one of the top floors. The fourth scene takes place on United Flight 93, and is told from the point of view of an elderly female passenger. Updike fills in the picture before and after Todd Beamer was overheard saying: “You guys ready? Let’s roll.”

Reviews of single short stories are uncommon, but “Varieties’ is one of those rare small works that deserves massive attention. We make sense of the world, and of our own lives, by making stories. To simply read about the tragedy is like listening to someone talk in his sleep; fiction, specifically Updike’s fiction, transports us into the dream (or nightmare) of Sept. 11. Nonfiction gives an intellectual grasp of the event, while Updike renders the emotional and sensual human experience as well.

Updike accomplishes this illusion with the jarring but graceful imagery we’ve grown to expect from him, as when Kellogg, the first narrator, can barely comprehend the sight of the gargantuan South Tower’s collapse: “As abruptly as a girl letting fall her silken gown, the entire skyscraper dropped its sheath and vanished, with a silvery rippling noise.”

When Kellogg is subsequently asked by his granddaughter why God let the terrorists commit this act, Updike writes, “He had an answer, a new one to this, but he didn’t give it” — that “new” one being that maybe God’s not there.” Later, when Kellogg and his family join his local Episcopalian congregation for a 9/11 prayer service, Kellogg looks around and observes: “Like dogs, we creep back to lick the hand of a God who, if He exists, has just given us a vicious kick.”

The second installment pivots neatly off factual reportage involving the two terrorists who spent time drinking and bragging about being pilots in a Florida strip club. Updike describes an American exotic dancer through Mohamed’s liquor-reddened, righteous eyes: “” a young woman, naked save for strategic patches of tinsel and a dusting of glitter, writhed around a brass pole to a virtually mocking mutter of tuneless music.” For him, she represents ‘this unclean [American] society disfigured by supposed opportunities and pleasures,” against which he has meticulously prepared to strike a blow that will guarantee his berth in paradise.

And in precisely the moment that Updike has us sniffing tobacco smoke and booze from that Florida roadhouse on our own sleeves, we are brusquely elevated — in scene three — to the 90th floor of Tower One, where we get instead, “a rising smell, a tarry industrial smell, oily and sweet, remind[ing] ” of airport runways, and the heat vibrations one sees while waiting to take off.”

Bond trader Jim Finch, on the phone with his wife, is all but overcome as he stays low, making his way to the windows, where, “Like an airplane seizing altitude in its wings, he left gravity behind.”

Yet Updike’s tale is not to be confused with pathos. As with any solid short story, there is identification and tension, particularly in Updike’s seemingly clairvoyant unfolding of events on the jet that crashed in the Pennsylvania cornfield. There is also resolution — a symbolic evolution and hope — to be found not just in the straightforward action of passengers, but in the simple words of children.

Consider Kellogg’s grandchildren discussing the spotlights that stood in for the collapsed Twin Towers: “”Don’t be scared,” her younger sister told her. “My teacher says the blue lights are like the rainbow. They mean it won’t happen again.”"

Updike is not making any promises. Poet, critic, author of more than 50 books, he has just done his job — finally. He has come through with his fiction, which, like therapy-induced hypnosis, is capable of transporting us to the horrific reality that has been heretofore inaccessible to most.

David McGrath teaches writing and Native American literature at College of DuPage. His essays and short stories have appeared in The Chicago Reader, Education Digest, Chicago Tribune and Artful Dodge. Previous PopPolitics articles can be found here.