"A&P" by John Updike

     I enjoyed John Updike's short story "A&P," and all the details he captures in the first person narration of Sammy the store clerk. I've always found John Updike's sketches of middle class America close to the home of my own upbringing, if you substitute Protestantism for something else, a mix of Catholic and Lutheran thought. Because of the larger themes in his writing that he carefully packs into the small towns of his writing, I often have to read the stories multiple times to get a full appreciation. 

    My favorite part of the story is the detail about the "three real estate" agencies when he's describing the town North of Boston. It reminds me of coming over the hill where I partially grew up, seeing all the small town shops and carrying my Nabakov book to the benches behind the pizzeria. Sammy as a narrator is extremely self-confident in his playful descriptions of the consumerism of the A&P. My 3rd job, when I was 16, was as a cashier in Stop & Shop, a New England company, and I enjoy when writers dip and critique the consumerism of the United States. One of my favorite short story writers, Raymond Carver, is often described as part of the "K-Mart" generation of writers, who wrote about the lower middle working class that evolved out of the transition to two parent working households in the 1970s and 1980s. 

    I appreciate the innocent way Sammy rebels in the ending of the story, in what I see as Updike's comments on the changing society and convention. I feel that, like the actor Anthony Hopkins, John Updike had an adverse reaction to the societal upheaval of the 1960s. The quiet realization that "things are going to be hard" for Sammy if he flies in the face of his community's conventions hints at a much darker reality, that when put in this way, leaves a lot of negative space to build on, and I'm able to fill Sammy's future up with my own memories of when various forms of rebellion backfired. Being a kid and throwing rocks at things, or when I was a little older, cutting class. Times when I felt out of step with convention, I think a popular feeling for any teenager--I think Updike does a remarkable job of cutting out characters that feel like real people you might pass in a supermarket, while also making them caricatures. There's a lot of movement through the aisles, to the geography of the town, that Sammy takes us through by description, while there isn't any change in where the story physically takes place. It's almost as if Sammy and the three girls were like yearlings in what was about to be a cultural revolution of the 1960s, they just simply didn't know it quite yet.