Sublime

Updike’s “A&P”

here, plainly, Updike is more interested in his personal filing-system than in his normal courteousness towards the reader.

Blur rises up his legs and torso. He’s drowning in pitch.

It’s easy to know what life is like for Daddy. Daddy is happiest when he is fixing up a place and putting it in order. Daddy smells like turpentine and he has black and white hair like a sheepdog and when he’s at home he wears white sneakers stained green from mowing the lawn.

I see this girl, Vanden, for a while, who paints my futon frame black and who stopped seeing me because she said she saw “a spider the size of Norman Mailer” in my bathroom. I didn’t ask her who Norman Mailer was, and I didn’t ask her to come back.