Fair or not, it is next to impossible to read David Updike without comparison to his paterfamilias, John, the iconic American author who died earlier this year.

On that score alone, David Updike deserves a badge of courage — coming out at this time with “Old Girlfriends,” a compilation of stories about love and families that (yes!) does reward readers with echoes of his father.

But the book, David Updike’s first in 21 years, stands on its own. It even gives readers something his father never did —story after story we can crawl into and live within.

Moreover, several of these stories have masterful endings (a gift not offered enough in contemporary fiction)—and all of them are gentle, nuanced, worthwhile.

Plus, the stories’ protagonists, all of them young men, have lives that parallel David Updike’s own—a New England upbringing; a child of divorce; a girlfriend and, later, wife from Africa; then a son of mixed blood, a preoccupation with life’s greater questions.

In the moving story “A Word with the Boy,” a Caucasian father and his young half-African son are visiting London when they are taken aside — and separated — by two British policemen.

The father burns with remorse afterward:

“The whole thing evolved so quietly, so slowly, I didn’t have the wherewithal to put a stop to their inquest, to refuse to have my son taken aside, pulled away from his own father to be questioned, at the age of eight, by police. Too late.”

In the title story, “Old Girlfriends,” there is a splendid description of public high school girls pouring into a subway in Queens:

“ — as the lights of the train flickered on and off and they sped through the tunnel, he would study these girls who had suddenly surrounded him at a surprising and wonderful proximity: so beautiful he found them, the Asians in their shy and whispering packs, the Latinas with their tight jeans and bright lipstick and their belly buttons looking out at the world like a third eye, the bawdy Americans, both beige and brown, their beckoning, knowing bodies cloaked in improbable styles of high school chic, their wide eyes and cackling laughs and scissoring, masticating, gum-chewing mouths so different from the pale, restrained beauties of his own chaste Connecticut town.”

In “Kinds of Love,” a story focused on a single church experience, a young husband and father leaves his family on a Sunday morning to meet his paramour at her Episcopal church:

“He had come to enjoy church for this alone — this hour of attempted centered-ness, of sitting still and doing nothing else for this one sacred interlude in the busyness and chaos of the week, the logistics of deception and the roller coaster of his own emotions: home, and then to work, and then the trying and the needing to see her, be with her, on phone or in person, in spirit and the flesh, the discontent and apprehensions when he could not, and then home again, back to husbandhood and fatherhood, back into the pretense and sometimes comfort of normalcy.” Adultery, one of his father’s frequent themes, is also found here in “The Last of the Caribs” wherein David Updike’s protagonist describes a gift of costly sunglasses from a Danish woman with whom he has just had a brief fling:

“The case opened and shut with a satisfying snap, the beautifully made sunglasses held safely inside, like a naked woman in a coffin.”

David Updike clearly has his father’s eye for minutiae, and sense of time and place. But he also has his own soft and appealing humor — found here in the character of Sonya, a therapist in the title story who is “not very good at confidentiality.”

Sonya (whose mantra is “Remember — time and energy, that’s all we have”) is a Holocaust survivor who tells the story’s protagonist, “Anyway, you’re getting a little sex. Good for you. Don’t make a baby. What else? Tell me something — more, interesting. How’s school?”

Some of the stories here are continuations of others, earlier in the book, giving the collection a feeling of wholeness. They follow on the heels of the publication of John Updike’s last story compilation, “My Father’s Tears.”

Both books teem with reflection and insight — and John Updike’s is clearly from the hand of the master. But David Updike’s stories measure up.

They are, he says in his dedication, “For my parents, who have always been with me, and always will be.” The beauty, then, is that David Updike’s stories are told in his own clear voice, with some shades of his father’s — and not the other way around.

Karen Brady is a retired News columnist.

Old Girlfriends: Stories

By David Updike

St. Martin’s Press

212 pages, $24.99