The Carol Sing by John Updike, 1970
The magic trick:
Working the same theme with every sentence
And so begins 12 days of Christmas on the SSMT site.
We begin by singing “Merry Christmas” from John Updike’s (fictional) Tarbox, Massachusetts. It seems a fitting place for a “things aren’t as good as they used to be” story, and this is about as good as you’ll find in that particular genre.
Every sentence is flowing down the same river. There really isn’t a single word fighting upstream here. The descriptions focus on fading glory, aging parishioners (I bet the narrator here is all of 40 years old), diminishing returns.
It may sound depressing. Certainly the tragic absence at the center of the story is not happy. But there is something exhilarating about reading such a completely formed idea as a story like this.
And that’s quite a trick on Updike’s part.
The selection:
When he hit a good “oh,” standing beside him was like being inside a great transparent Christmas ball. He had what you’d have to call a God-given bass. This year, we other male voices just peck at the tunes: Wendall Huddlestone, whose hardware store has become a pizza place where the dropouts collect after dark; Squire Wentworth, who is still getting up petitions to protect the marsh birds from the atomic power plant; Lionel Merson, lighter this year by about three pounds of gallstones; and that selectman whose freckled bald head looks like the belly of a trout; and that fireman whose face is bright brown all the year round from clamming; and the widow Covode’s bearded son, who went into divinity school to avoid the draft; and the Bisbee boy, who no sooner was back from Vietnam than he grew a beard and painted his car every color of the rainbow; and the husband of the new couple that moved this September into the Whitman place on the beach road. He wears thick glasses above a little mumble of a mouth tight as a keyhole, but his wife appears perky enough.
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