I only wish it were longer.

• mattbucher
• October 28, 2008
• The World on Sunday
• Reply

I wrote my HS senior thesis in AP English on the short story "Incest" in this book. I told Updike this after a reading once and he looked at me, thought about it and told me about how he wrote that story as a young father, maybe it was the first story he wrote after becoming a father, and that he fondly remembers writing it, the way he remembers his children being young. Now I am a young father and I find myself thinking of this story occasionally, especially the part Nicholson Baker quotes in his book on Updike (U and I) about the narrator watching his daughter and wife play on the floor and leaning his head against the bookshelf, near the anthology shelf, and considering all the poetry he'd ever read evaporating inside himself, "a vast dying sea."

• mattbucher
• October 28, 2008
• The Same Door, Short Stories
• Reply