Updike, Ms. Beattie, and Me
by Joshua Bodwell
Joshua Bodwell on the stories we tell, literary coincidences, and a correction to Best American Short Stories of the Century (with footnotes).
Joshua Bodwell on the stories we tell, literary coincidences, and a correction to Best American Short Stories of the Century (with footnotes).
“After all, when there are few places to physically go in a story, every movement counts.” Alyson Mosquera Dutemple inhabits the limited settings of John Updike’s “A&P” and Stewart O’Nan’s Last Night at the Lobster.
It just kept nosing its way into my own novel—“A&P” by John Updike. I’d first read it when teaching lit classes years before, and now, as I finished my third novel, my characters kept making references to it: a girl’s mind “just a little buzz like a bee in a glass jar” or the way the boy at the register sees the girls’ bathing suits. Knowing it’s best to let the subconscious have its way while writing fiction, I let the story in, even as I wondered what it was doing there. My novel, Grand Isle, was in print a […]
Sad news: John Updike succumbed to lung cancer today at the age of 76. William Pritchard has drawn up a list of what he considers the author’s most important works here. I remember hiding the Rabbit books under my bed as a teenager, loving how Updike could write even the dirtiest moments so beautifully. His prose is always alive, startlingly specific, full of those little truths we seek in literature. The first time I read “A&P,” I was 16 and bowled over by descriptions like this: Her voice kind of startled me, the way voices do when you see the […]
