The Orphaned Swimming Pool by John Updike, 1970
The magic trick:
Portraying suburban neighbors as an unruly band of animals
It’s early June. The weather is beautiful in Washington, D.C. Let’s do a swimming pool story.
This one is very similar to – or at least in deep conversation with – John Cheever’s 1947 story “Roseheath.” Both stories center the backyard swimming pool as the setting of a suburban bliss that actually doubles as a kind of life-sucking torture.
In this underrated Updike gem, I particularly like the way the neighborhood’s usurpation of the abandoned swimming pool is given an animalistic feel. It’s almost like the kids in Lord Of The Flies. It’s also very funny.
And that’s quite a trick on Updike’s part.
The selection:
When people, that July, said, “Meet you at the pool,” they did not mean the public pool past the shopping center, or the country-club pool beside the first tee. They meant the Turners’/ Restrictions on admission were difficult to enforce tactfully. A visiting Methodist bishop, two Taiwanese economists, an entire girls’ softball team from Darien, an eminent Candadian poet, the archery champion of Hartford, the six members of a black rock group called The Good Intentions, an ex-mistress of Aly Khan, the lavender-haired mother-in-law of a Nixon adviser not quite of Cabinet rank, an infant of six weeks, a man who was killed the next day on the Merritt Parkway, a Filipino who could stay on the pool bottom for eighty seconds, two Texans who kept cigars in their mouths and hats on their heads, three telephone linemen, four expatriate Czechs, a student Maoist from Wesleyan, and the postman all swam, as guests, in the Turners’ pool, though not all at once.
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