EARLY STORIES, THE(ISBN=9780345463364)pdf/txt下载_在线阅读全文

内容简介

""He is a religious writer; he is a comic realist; he knows whateverything feels like, how everything works. He is putting togethera body of work which in substantial intelligent creation willeventually be seen as second to none in our time."--William H.Pritchard, The Hudson Review, reviewing Museums and Women (1972)" Aharvest and not a winnowing, "The Early Stories" preserves almostall of the short fiction John Updike published between 1954 and1975. The stories are arranged in eight sections, of which thefirst, "Olinger Stories," already appeared as a paperback in 1964;in its introduction, Updike described Olinger, Pennsylvania, as "asquare mile of middle-class homes physically distinguished by abend in the central avenue that compels some side streets todeviate from the grid pattern." These eleven tales, whose heroesage from ten to over thirty but remain at heart Olinger boys, arefollowed by groupings titled "Out in the World," "Married Life,"and "Family Life," tracing a common American trajectory. Familylife is disrupted by the advent of "The Two Iseults," a bifurcationoriginating in another small town, Tarbox, Massachusetts, where thePuritan heritage co-exists with post-Christian morals. "TarboxTales" are followed by "Far Out," a group of more or lessexperimental fictions on the edge of domestic space, and "TheSingle Life," whose protagonists are unmarried and unmoored. Ofthese one hundred three stories, eighty first appeared in "The NewYorker, "and the other twenty-three in journals from the enduring"Atlantic Monthly" and "Harper's" to the defunct "Big Table "and"Transatlantic Review." All show Mr. Updike's wit and verbalfelicity, his reverence for ordinary life, and his love of thetransient world. "From the Hardcover edition."

""He is a religious writer; he is a comic realist; he knows what
everything feels like, how everything works. He is putting together
a body of work which in substantial intelligent creation will
eventually be seen as second to none in our time."--William H.
Pritchard, The Hudson Review, reviewing Museums and Women (1972)" A
harvest and not a winnowing, "The Early Stories" preserves almost
all of the short fiction John Updike published between 1954 and
1975. The stories are arranged in eight sections, of which the
first, "Olinger Stories," already appeared as a paperback in 1964;
in its introduction, Updike described Olinger, Pennsylvania, as "a
square mile of middle-class homes physically distinguished by a
bend in the central avenue that compels some side streets to
deviate from the grid pattern." These eleven tales, whose heroes
age from ten to over thirty but remain at heart Olinger boys, are
followed by groupings titled "Out in the World," "Married Life,"
and "Family Life," tracing a common American trajectory. Family
life is disrupted by the advent of "The Two Iseults," a bifurcation
originating in another small town, Tarbox, Massachusetts, where the
Puritan heritage co-exists with post-Christian morals. "Tarbox
Tales" are followed by "Far Out," a group of more or less
experimental fictions on the edge of domestic space, and "The
Single Life," whose protagonists are unmarried and unmoored. Of
these one hundred three stories, eighty first appeared in "The New
Yorker, "and the other twenty-three in journals from the enduring
"Atlantic Monthly" and "Harper's" to the defunct "Big Table "and"
Transatlantic Review." All show Mr. Updike's wit and verbal
felicity, his reverence for ordinary life, and his love of the
transient world. "From the Hardcover edition."

显示全部信息

作者简介

John Updike was born in 1932, in Shillington, Pennsylvania. Since 1957 he has lived in Massachusetts. His novels have won the Pulitzer Prize, the National Book Award, the National Book Critics Circle Award and the Howells Medal.

目　　录

Foreword
OLINGER STORIES
You'll Never Know, Dear, How Much I Love You
The Alligators
Pigeon Feathers
Friends from Philadelphia
A Sense of Shelter
Flight
The Happiest I've Been
The Persistence of Desire
The Blessed Man of Boston, My Grandmother's Thimble, and FanningIsland
Packed Dirt, Churchgoing, a Dying Cat, a Traded Car
In Football Season
OLIT IN THE WORLD

显示全部信息

在线试读部分章节

You?ll Never Know, Dear, How Much I Love You

Carnival! In the vacant lot behind the old ice plant! Trucks havebeen unloading all afternoon; the WhirloGig has been unfolded likea giant umbrella, they assembled the baby Ferris wheel with anErector Set. Twice the trucks got stuck in the mud. Straw has beenstrewn everywhere. They put up a stage and strung lights. Now, now,gather your pennies; supper is over and an hour of light is left inthe long summer day. See, Sammy Hunnenhauser is running; GloriaGring and her gang have been there all afternoon, they never gohome, oh hurry, let me go; how awful it is to have parents that arepoor, and slow, and sad!

Fifty cents. The most Ben could beg. A nickel for every year of hislife. It feels like plenty. Over the roof of crazy Mrs. Moffert?shouse, the Ferris wheel tints the air with pink, and the rim ofthis pink mixes in his excitement with the great notched rim of thecoin sweating in his hand. This house, then this house, and pastthe ice plant, and he will be there. Already the rest of the worldis there, he is the last, hurrying, hurrying, the balloon is aboutto take off, the Ferris wheel is lifting; only he will be leftbehind, on empty darkening streets.

You?ll Never Know, Dear, How Much I Love You 
 
Carnival! In the vacant lot behind the old ice plant! Trucks have
been unloading all afternoon; the WhirloGig has been unfolded like
a giant umbrella, they assembled the baby Ferris wheel with an
Erector Set. Twice the trucks got stuck in the mud. Straw has been
strewn everywhere. They put up a stage and strung lights. Now, now,
gather your pennies; supper is over and an hour of light is left in
the long summer day. See, Sammy Hunnenhauser is running; Gloria
Gring and her gang have been there all afternoon, they never go
home, oh hurry, let me go; how awful it is to have parents that are
poor, and slow, and sad! 
 
Fifty cents. The most Ben could beg. A nickel for every year of his
life. It feels like plenty. Over the roof of crazy Mrs. Moffert?s
house, the Ferris wheel tints the air with pink, and the rim of
this pink mixes in his excitement with the great notched rim of the
coin sweating in his hand. This house, then this house, and past
the ice plant, and he will be there. Already the rest of the world
is there, he is the last, hurrying, hurrying, the balloon is about
to take off, the Ferris wheel is lifting; only he will be left
behind, on empty darkening streets. 
 
Then there, what to buy? There are not so many people here.
Grownups carrying babies mosey glassily on the straw walks. All the
booth people, not really Gypsies, stare at him, and beckon weakly.
It hurts him to ignore the man with the three old softballs, and
the old cripple at the merry-go-round, and the fat lady with her
plaster Marys, and the skeleton suspended behind a fountain of
popcorn. He feels his walking past them as pain. He wishes there
were more people here; he feels a fool. All of this machinery
assembled to extract from him his pathetic fifty cents. He watches
at a distance a thickset man in earnestly rolled-up shirtsleeves
twirl a great tinselled wheel with a rubber tongue that patters
slower and slower on a circle of nails until it stops between two,
and the number there wins. Only a sailor and two boys in yellow
silk high-school athletic jackets play. None win. The thick
tattooed arm below the rolled-up shirtsleeve carefully sweeps their
nickels from a long board divided and numbered as if for hopscotch.
The high-school boys, with sideburns and spotty whiskers on their
bright-pink jaws, put down nickels again leadenly, and this time
the man spinning the wheel shouts when it stops, seems more joyful
than they, and reaches into his deep apron pocket and pours before
them, without counting, a perfect little slipping stack of nickels.
Their gums showing as if at a dirty joke, the two boys turn?the
shimmer on their backs darts and shifts in cool z?s?and walk away,
while the man is shouting, ?Hey, uh winneh. Hey, uh winneh,
evvybody wins.? His board is bare, and as his mouth continues to
form the loud words his eyes lock Ben into a stare of heartbreaking
brown blankness that seems to elucidate with paralyzing clarity
Ben?s state: his dungarees, his fifty cents, his ten years, his
position in space, and above the particulars the immense tinted
pity, the waste, of being at one little place instead of
everywhere, at any time. Then the man looks away, and twirls the
wheel for his own amusement. 
 
The fifty-cent piece feels huge to Ben?s fingers, a wide oppressive
rigidity that must be broken, shattered into twinkling fragments,
to merge in the tinsel and splinters of strewn straw. He buys, at
the first stand he strikes, a cone of cotton candy, and receives,
with the furry pink pasty uncoiling thing, a quarter, a dime, and a
nickel: three coins, tripling his wealth. 
 
Now people multiply, crowd in from the houses of the town, which
stand beyond the lot on all sides in black forbidding silhouettes
like the teeth of a saw. The lights go on; the faces of the houses
flee. There is nothing in the lot but light, and at its core, on
the stage, three girls wearing white cowboy hats and white spangled
skirts and white boots appear, and a man also in white and bearing
a white guitar strung with gold. The legs around Ben crush him
toward the stage; the smell of mud mingles with the bright sight
there. One of the girls coughs into the microphone and twists its
neck, so a sharp whine pierces from the loudspeakers and cuts a
great crescent through the crowd, leaving silence as harvest. The
girls sing, toe-tapping gingerly: ?The other night, dear, as I lay
sleeping, I dreamt I held you in my arms.? The spangles on their
swishing skirts spring prickles like tears in Ben?s eyes. The three
voices sob, catch, twang, distend his heart like a rubber band at
the highest pitch of their plaint. ??I was mistaken, and I hung my
head, a-and cried.? And then the unbearable rising sugar of the
chorus that makes his scalp so tight he fears his head will burst
from sweet fullness. 
 
The girls go on to sing other songs, less good, and then they give
way to a thin old man in suspenders and huge pants he keeps
snapping and looking down and whooping into. He tells horrible
jokes that make the nice fat ladies standing around Ben?nice fat
factory and dust-mop women that make him feel protected?shake with
laughter. He fears their quaking, feels threatened from beneath, as
if there is a treacherous stratum under this mud and straw. He
wanders away, to let the words of ?You Are My Sunshine? revolve in
his head. ?Please don?t take my sunshine away.? Only the money in
his pocket weighs him; get rid of it, and he will sail away like a
dandelion seed. 
 
He goes to the booth where the wheel is turning, and puts his
nickel on the board in a square marked 7, and loses it. 
 
He puts the dime there, and it too is taken away. 
 
Squeezed, almost hidden, between the crusty trousered haunches of
two adults, he puts down his quarter, as they do, on the inner
edge, to be changed. The tattooed man comes along, picking up the
quarters and pouring, with his wonderfully automatic fingers, the
little slipping stacks of five nickels; Ben holds his breath, and
to his horror feels his low face catch in the corner of the man?s
absent-minded eyes. The thick solemn body snags in its smooth
progress, and Ben?s five nickels are raggedly spaced. Between the
second and third there is a gap. A blush cakes Ben?s cheeks; his
gray-knuckled fingers, as they push out a nickel, are trembling
sideways at each other. But the man goes back, and spins the wheel,
and Ben loses three nickels one after another. The twittering wheel
is a moon-faced god; but Ben feels humanity clouding the space
between him and it, which should be unobstructed. When the tattooed
arm?a blue fish, an anchor, the queer word peace?comes to sweep in
his nickels, he feels the stippled skin breathing thought, and
lowers his head against the expected fall of words. Nothing is
said, the man moves on, returns to the wheel; but Ben feels puzzled
pressure radiating from him, and the pointed eyes of a man in a
suit with chalk stripes who has come to stand at the far side of
the stand intersect this expanding circle, and Ben, hurrying to
pour his money down a narrowing crack, puts down his last two
nickels, still on 7. 
 
The rubber tongue leaps into pattering and as the wheel whirls the
tattooed man leans backward to hear the one in chalk stripes talk;
this one?s tongue patters silently but a tiny motion of his smooth
hand, simultaneous with a sideways stab of his eyes, is toward
Ben. 
 
The rubber tongue slows, flops, stops at 7?no, 8. He lost, and can
leave. The floor of his stomach lifts queerly. ?Hey, kid.? The man
with terrible spoiled arms comes over. Ben feels that no matter how
fast he would run those arms would stretch and snare him. 
 
?Huh?? 
 
?How old are you, kid?? 
 
?Ten.? 
 
?Whatsamatta with ya, ya daddy rich?? 
 
A titter moves stiffly among the immense adult heads all around.
Ben understands the familiar role, that he has undergone a hundred
times with teachers and older boys, of being a comic prop. He
understands everything, and wants to explain that he knows his eyes
are moist and his cheeks red but that it?s because of joy, freedom,
not because of losing. But this would be too many words; even the
one-word answer ?No? sticks to the roof of his mouth and comes
loose with a faint tearing noise. 
 
?Here.? With his exciting expert touch, the tattooed man flicks
Ben?s two coins back across the painted number. Then he digs into
his pocket. He comes up with the usual little stack of five, drops
four, but holds the fifth delicately between the tips of two
fingers and a thumb, hesitates so that Ben can reread peace in blue
above his wrist, and then flips the fifth nickel up into his palm
and thence down with a plunge into his dirty sagging apron
pouch. 
 
?Now move away from the board, kid, move away. Don?t come
back.? 
 
Ben fumbles the coins into his hands and pushes away, his eyes
screwed to the sharp edge of painted wood, and he shoulders blindly
backward through the legs. Yet all the time, in the midst of the
heat and water welling up from springs all over his body, he is
figuring, and calculates he?s been gypped. Forty: he had the
quarter and dime and nickel, and they gave him back only six
nickels: thirty. The injustice. They pretend he?s too little to
lose and then keep a dime. The waste. The lost dime seems a tiny
hole through which everything in existence is draining. As he moves
away, his wet knees jarring, trying to hide forever from every
sailor and fat woman and high-schooler who witnessed his disgrace,
the six nickels make a knobbed weight bumping his thigh through his
pocket. The spangles, the splinters of straw and strings of light,
the sawtooth peaks of houses showing behind the heads of grown-ups
moving above the scent of grassy mud are hung like the needles of a
Christmas tree with the transparent, tinted globes confusing his
eyelashes. 
 
Thus the world, like a jaded coquette, spurns our attempts to give
ourselves to her wholly.

显示全部信息

EARLY STORIES, THE(ISBN=9780345463364)下载

EARLY STORIES, THE(ISBN=9780345463364)

发布书评

相关图书推荐