Snowing In Greenwich Village by John Updike, 1956
The magic trick:
Selectively editorializing specific parts of the story to subtly shape the reader’s view of the situation
“Snowing In Greenwich Village” is one of the best Updike stories I’ve read. It captures something he’s very good at. He zooms in his narrative editorializing very keenly in certain places but ultimately leaves assessment of the overall situation to the reader.
Let me explain as that pertains to this story.
Here, we have a young couple welcoming a friend to their apartment one snowy evening. The three of them talk. The story’s told from the point of view of the man. He gives us plenty of editorializing about the scene and especially his wife and her friend’s habits. He is particularly analytical when it comes to the way the friend talks and how she tells stories. This is the editorial zoom I referenced before.
OK, but as the story goes on, the scene shifts. The man and the friend are walking home alone and his editorial analysis recedes. The situation is getting complicated and vague. But the narrative interpretation is gone. It’s now on the reader to figure out what is happening and what the implications might be.
Controlling that push and pull – how much the narrator analyzes for the reader – is probably crucial to making any story work.
It’s masterfully done here.
And that’s quite a trick on Updike’s part.
The selection:
The Maples laughed, less at the words themselves than at the way Rebecca had evoked the full situation by conveying, in her understated imitation, both her escort’s flamboyant attitude and her own undemonstrative nature. They could see her standing by the taxi door, gazing with no expression as her escort bent lower and lower, seized by his own joke, his fingers writhing demoniacally as he felt horns sprout from his scalp, flames lick his ankles, and his feet shrivel into scarlet hoofs. Rebecca’s gift, Richard realized, was not that of having odd things happen to her but that of representing, through the implicit contrast with her own sane calm, all things touching her as odd. This evening, too, might appear grotesque in her retelling: “Six policemen on horses galloped by, and she cried ‘It’s snowing!’ and hugged him. He kept telling her how sick she was and filling us full of sherry.”
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