In times of change, I return unwittingly to Updike’s 1961 New Yorker story “A&P.” I first encountered the brief diegesis in the back of a Norton anthology. Then, I couldn’t understand “how hard the world was going to be to [him t]hereafter.” Why did this faintly tense, horny interaction at a grocery counter incite such urgency on the narrator’s part? Why was he moved by the innocent transgression of a handful of rich girls buying a jar of herring in swimsuits?
The next time I read it was a couple years later, over the phone, reciting the pages to my friends who’d recently come to partake in a transgressive relationship of their own. I tried to capture this nineteen-year-old flunky, a voice that should’ve been more familiar, having donned the shirt and tie at a Roche Bros. register just a few years prior. But the cadence, the playfulness of Updike’s prose, and the layers of innuendo he stacked through Sammy’s halting nerve, was more than I could conjure or engulf.
There’s a certain implacability flowing through John Updike’s career. One that refused to be repressed, and marched into the murkiest territory at great risk. One of Sorel’s “Laureates of the Lewd” (see his caricature alongside Roth and Vidal in the National Portrait Gallery), Updike redefined the revolutionary sixties through pomp and crisp polos. So while Rabbit Angstrom pushes the boundaries of propriety, domesticity, and sexuality over the course of thirty years, so too does the author lambast his own limitations with bawdy fairy tales, ironic metafiction, racist diatribe, and religious fundamentalism.
Ergo, a few weeks back, on a rainy afternoon, when I felt compelled to print out and read “A&P” aloud again to another friend, nearly two decades after my initiation with this tantalizing narrative, the years informed its frisky candor. Updike toed the line so gracefully, I could barely recognize how much the story transmuted with age. “But, you know, sheep…” The world only gets harder the more you look at it. Don’t hesitate. When your stomach falls, laugh.
-David Fishkind