What do You think about Pigeon Feathers And Other Stories (1996)?
Updike's prose is astonishing - it elevates the mundane into the spiritual, with an earnestness that defies Nabokov and with the precision of a painter. It's no wonder that JU was an art student; his stories remind one of paintings.The collection is at its best when JU writes in an autobiographical mode. I sense the influence of Proust (one of his favorite writers) in his attempt to regain lost time. "Flight," "Pigeon Feathers," "The Blessed Man of Boston, My Grandmother's Thimble, and Fanning Island," "Home," and "A Sense of Shelter" are written in this Proustian mode, only they're more relatable to me because they come from the pen of an American writer. These are some of the best short stories I've ever read.The collection, however, has a few misfires, especially when JU writes in a more "experimental" way. He's just not Joyce, Woolf, or Lawrence - and that's fine. Stories like "Should Wizard Hit Mommy?," "Archangel," and "Lifeguard" are so overwrought and overcooked that they read like creative writing exercises and failed attempts to be "avant-garde."
—Paul Gleason
boy with stutter suffers from unrequited love. man with dilated eyes attempts to seduce a woman in an optometrist's office. couple in a disintegrating marriage struggle to remember an old friend's name on a long car ride home. earnest but frightened boy learns something about death when he is forced to shoot pigeons who have roosted in the family barn. a son learns to respect his father after an altercation with a bad driver. this collection is full of touching, seemingly commonplace incidences such as these. there's so much spontaneity, but it's also very precise, very believable, very... good. just good. updike seems to have discovered an entire quarry of human emotion in which he set to work leaving no stone unturned. and it is written so well, in his own sort of hyperrealism, that i constantly felt deja vu when he described tiny parts of the day or motions of the hand or rambling thoughts with such clarity. the warmth, wisdom and possibility in the stories makes me think of my grandfather, which isn't surprising, as Updike is himself a baby boomer. he captures American optimism so well, without editorializing or straying from a realistic style, that it reminds me of Norman Rockwell's cover illustrations for the Saturday Evening Post. above all, this is just really exceptional writing.
—Keith Michael
In this fine collection of stories, I especially liked "A & P". By using “walks” with its “s” in the first sentence – “In walks these three girls in nothing but bathing suits.” – Updike immediately characterizes his first person narrator as young or marginally educated or of working class background. In fact, the narrator is a nineteen-year-old cashier in a small New England grocery store. The story is short, a gem-like vignette, and Updike has the tone, the psychology, and the speech of his characters just right. His metaphors are creative and perfectly apt.This coming-of-age story, reminiscent of Salinger, is briefly told. Three girls some into the grocery store for a single item, “fancy herring,” which suggests to the narrator a higher class of society than his own. The narrator, Sammy, and his fellow cashier watch them as they navigate the aisles, observing them and speculating, mostly just appreciating them, the eroticism of the experience obvious. Updike’s descriptions of Sammy’s and Stokesie’s observations, thoughts, and conclusions match them to perfection. Finally, as the girls are checking out, the dour and proper manager, an older gentleman (a Sunday School teacher, of course, and a friend of Sammy’s parents), chastises them for their “inappropriate” attire, embarrassing all three but especially the most poised and attractive, called by Sammy “the Queen.” As the girls leave the store, Sammy protests to the manager about his having humiliated the girls and, in a kind of chivalric gesture, quits his job, taking off and leaving his apron and bow tie. Outside he knows that he has made a decision that somehow may make the world harder for him hereafter, his having marked out his own path, independent of his parents and an older generation.The delight of this story is Updike’s having captured a situation and its characters so perfectly, having been able to step inside people unlike himself and know and communicate what they think, feel, and how they respond to life. He does this with such skill that the reader “knows” that he is correct, and the reader in turn for a short time inhabits the lives of people outside his own experience or at least awareness. The transitional decade of the 60’s, with its movement from New England Puritanism to a new liberation, is made clear. Updike’s ear for dialogue and his ability to inhabit someone else’s skin in the most mundane of circumstances is uncanny and mesmerizing. And his writing itself is flawless, using syntax and diction, metaphor and pace, in a way that is almost magical; his is a virtuoso literary performance. I enjoyed this little story very much.
—Bruce
