The Music School by John Updike, 1964
The magic trick:
Presenting three seemingly unrelated ideas and uniting them in the fourth and final section
During the early 1960s, Updike did a lot of experimenting with the short story form, jamming three or four seemingly unrelated ideas or mini-stories together against one another in a single story. The effect is that the reader naturally looks for artistic connections between the ideas, but the author doesn’t have to mess with stitching things together in a more complex or subtle way. Perhaps the most famous example of this is Updike’s 1962 story “The Blessed Man Of Boston, My Grandmother’s Thimble, And Fanning Island.” The title gives its technique away, right?
“The Music School” employs a less direct title, but we find the same technique here – with three key ideas mashed together.
One: a rumination on whether Holy Communion crackers should be bitten or left to dissolve in one’s mouth.
Two: finding out that an acquaintance was recently murdered in his home.
Three: appreciation of the chance to take his daughter to music lessons.
My list actually is a bit misleading. There is a fourth section here that does some work to tie the things together, and it’s what makes this the most successful – to me at least – of these Updike mashup stories. The narrator matter-of-factly relates that his wife goes to a psychiatrist because he is unfaithful to her. This, then, seems to be the common thread through the three ideas.
They take on a much different look now.
And that’s quite a trick on Updike’s part.
The selection:
The church smelled like this school, glinting with strange whispers and varnished highlights. I am neither musical nor religious. Each moment I live, I must think where to place my fingers, and press them down with no confidence of hearing a chord. My friends are like me. We are all pilgrims, groping our way toward divorce, which has replaced death as the redemptive horizon.
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