‘Flight’ by John Updike

Flight by John Updike, 1959

The magic trick:

Masterclass in story structure

I’d imagine Harold Brodkey was a fan of this story. It recalls his penchant for self-absorbed self-analysis. Or maybe I have the influence the wrong way around. Regardless, this is pretty relentless navel gazing. And yet, by the end, I’m totally in the bag for this story, in awe of the author’s talent.

The structure is remarkable. It’s not a showy thing – no Christopher Nolan timeline shifts. It’s just a perfectly constructed story. We start with a specific memory from the narrator’s age 12 year. Then we zoom back out to go through a bunch of family tree, family history stuff. The key point in the early section is the boy and his mother’s twin characteristics for ego and ambition and feelings of misfit isolation in their town.

Then we move into a longer section about a specific memory the narrator has about starting to a date a girl when he was 17. This stands alone as the most narrative element of the story, but it also is always feeding more data into our ideas about the first section’s themes.

Meanwhile, the mother’s father is dying. It all comes together in the end with a fitting conclusion that is both dramatic and unresolving.

So many ideas. So masterfully intertwined.

And that’s quite a trick on Updike’s part.

The selection:

One Friday night in spring, after trying for over an hour to write thirty-five affectionate words for the yearbook about a bland girl in the Secretarial Course I had never spoken a word to, I heard my grandfather begin coughing upstairs with a sound like dry membrane tearing, and I panicked. I called up the stairs, “Mother! I must go out.”

“It’s nine-thirty.”

“I know, but I have to. I’m going insane.”

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