November 25, 2003
Menand on Updike
The New Yorker's Louis Menand has a piece on John Updike on the occasion of the publication of Updike's anthology The Early Stories. Menand prefaces his review with a discussion of short stories.
A short story is not as restrictive as a sonnet, but, of all the literary forms, it is possibly the most single-minded. Its aim, as it was identified by the modern genre’s first theorist, Edgar Allan Poe, is to create “an effect”—by which Poe meant something almost physical, like a sensation or (the term is appropriate, since Poe’s reputation was always greater in France than in his own country) a frisson. Every word in a story, Poe said, is in the service of this effect.
Menand read the stories in the anthology straight through and found that they formed a biography of Updike
The names of the characters change, of course, and the circumstances vary, but if you read the volume as a single narrative, which is the way it has been arranged, you find that it follows the experiences of a man who spends his childhood in southeastern Pennsylvania, goes off to Harvard, studies in England, marries while still a young man, moves to New York City and then to a town north of Boston, has several children, and, after twenty years of marriage, gets divorced—a man whose path through that chunk of the twentieth century is a lot like John Updike’s.Menand reviews several of the stories, and seems to have thoroughly enjoyed the anthology (unlike others.)
posted by Laila Lalami at 06:02 AM
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