Learn A Trade by John Updike, 1981
The magic trick:
Putting familiar parental advice in a surprising context
“Learn A Trade” takes a familiar bit of parental advice – the dad who insists on his children doing something useful with their lives and not counting on the arts – and puts them in a surprising context. Here, the advice is coming from a father who is himself a wealthy, successful artist. Wouldn’t he, of anyone, believe in the power of the artistic imagination?
And that’s quite a trick on Updike’s part.
The selection:
One night in bed, Fegley, shortly before going off to a New York art school, overheard his father say to his mother, “They’ll just break his heart.” The boy had sneered to overhear this, and, indeed, moving from cartooning, by way of imitating Picasso’s playful sculpture, into a world – of galleries and expectant museum spaces and the spacious duplexes and suburban gardens of the rich – that his father had never dreamed of, he had proved the old man wrong. Yet, the older he himself grew, the more it seemed that his father had been essentially right.
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