A & P
John Updike Biography
Born on March 18, 1932 in Reading, Pennsylvania
Died of lung cancer at the age of 76 on January 27, 2009 in Massachusetts
In an autobiographical essay, Updike identified sex, art, and religion as "the three great secret things" in human experience. Updike’s writing in all genres has displayed a fixation with philosophical questions. The Jesuit magazine America awarded him its Campion Award in 1997 as a "distinguished Christian person of letters." He received the National Medal of Art from President George H.W. Bush in 1989, and in 2003 was presented with the National Medal for the Humanities from President George W. Bush. John Updike was an only child, and shared a home with his parents and grandparents in Shillington, Pennsylvania. At a young age he read much popular fiction, especially humor and mysteries. He was also encouraged by mother to write and draw. The area surrounding Updike’s hometown provided the setting for many of his stories. John excelled in school, serving as the president and co-valedictorian of his graduating class at Shillington High School. He later received a tuition scholarship to Harvard University, where he majored in English. Before graduating, Updike married fellow student Mary E. Pennington. He graduated summa cum laude in 1954, and spent following year with his wife in England where he studied and Oxford’s Ruskin School of Drawing and Fine Art. The Updikes later settled in Manhattan, where John took a position as a staff writer at The New Yorker. He worked at the magazine for nearly two years, but in 1957 after his second child was born, decided to move his growing family to the small town of Ipswich, Massachusetts. He maintained a lifelong relationship with The New Yorker, where many of his poems, reviews and short stories appeared, but he resided in Massachusetts for the rest of his life. In 1964, Updike became the youngest person ever elected to the National Institute of Arts and Letters, and was invited by the State Department to tour eastern Europe as part of a cultural exchange program between the United States and the Soviet Union. In 1967, he joined American writers in signing a letter urging Soviet writers to defend Jewish cultural institutions under attack by the Soviet government. Updike continued to travel as a cultural ambassador of the United States, and in 1974 he joined authors John Cheever, Arthur Miller and Richard Wilbur in calling on the Soviet government to cease its persecution of nonconformist author Alexander Solzhenitsyn. Updike separated from his wife Mary in 1974, moving to Boston where he taught at Boston University. Two years later after officially divorcing his wife, he married Martha Ruggles Bernhard and settled with her and her three children in Georgetown, Massachusetts. John Updike spent his last years in Beverly Farms, Massachusetts, in the same area of New England where so much of his fiction is set. Over the course of his career, he published over 60 books, including novels, collections of short stories, poetry, drama, essays, memoirs and literary criticism.
Synopsis:
Sammy, a teenage clerk in an A & P grocery store, is working at a cash register during a hot summer day when three young women, who are about his age, enter the store barefoot and only in swimsuits, to buy herring snacks.
Although they are dressed for the beach, Sammy allows the girls to continue shopping while he appraises them sexually in the manner of teenage boys. He imagines for himself details of the girls from their appearance alone, undue impressions that, to his surprise, are shaken when the leader of the trio, a stunning girl he has dubbed "Queenie", speaks in a voice unlike that which he had created in his mind. Lengel, the old and prudish manager, feels that the girls are not clothed appropriately to come into a grocery store. He admonishes them, telling them that this isn't the beach and that they must have their shoulders covered next time, or have their business refused; which Sammy believes embarrassed them.
Offended by this mistreatment of these customers' dignity, Sammy ceremoniously removes his store apron and bow tie and resigns on the spot, despite the mention by the manager of the pain this would cause his parents. Sammy then leaves the store, seemingly in expectation of some display of affection or appreciation from the young women involved, only to find that they've already left, apparently oblivious to his presence. Sammy's disappointment in this development strikes a very typical Updike theme.
Quotes:
“You know, it's one thing to have a girl in a bathing suit down on the beach, where what with the glare nobody can look at each other much anyway, and another thing in the cool of the A & P, under the fluorescent lights, against all those stacked packages, with her feet paddling along naked over our checkerboard green-and-cream rubber-tile floor.”
“Stokesie's married, with two babies chalked up on his fuselage already, but as far as I can tell that's the only difference. He's twenty-two, and I was nineteen this April.”
“‘That's all right,’ Lengel said. ‘But this isn't the beach.’ His repeating this struck me as funny, as if it hadjust occurred to him, and he had been thinking all these years the A & P was a great big dune and he was the head lifeguard. He didn't like my smiling -- -as I say he doesn't miss much -- but he concentrates on giving the girls that sad Sunday- school-superintendent stare.”
“But it seems to me that once you begin a gesture it's fatal not to go through with it.”
“…and my stomach kind of fell as I felt how hard the world was going to be to me hereafter.”
Term
Theme is the central idea or meaning of a story. It provides a unified point around which the plot, characters, setting, point of view, symbols, and other elements of a story are organized.
Discussion Questions
1. Is Sammy's quitting a form of rebellion or a statement of some sort? If so, what is he rebelling against? Are there unconscious targets of his rebellion?
2. Is the girls’ behavior itself a kind of statement or rebellion of some sort? What message are they sending by walking into the A&P in their bathing suits? Why is it significant that they choose a supermarket for their self-display?
3. Why does the store manager oppose the girls' behavior? Are there generational conflicts represented in the story?
4. What is the significance of the different effects of fluorescent light and sunlight in the story? What is the artificial light symbolic of? What illusions was Sammy a victim of while inside the store, and what images await him outside?