Hollis 1

Dana Hollis

Vida Cross

English 215-452

July 30, 2016

Updike in Great Form

An Analysis of John Updike’s “The Other”

John Updike was in his heyday in the Fifties. When we think of Updike we may think of

a man who came of age in the 1950’s and had high ideals for intellectual atmospheres and

academic arenas, and an advocacy for classic middle-class America, and for the traditional

imagery associated with all that from the mid-twentieth century. The friendly trees of Harvard

Yard at that time, the tweed and patch professors, mustard notebooks and crimson scarves,

brown-framed, warm and still art, necking and footballs, latticed windows and blustery days with

dancing leaves, the charm of wild weather and weathered things, and the spires with pealing

bells. Or the beatnik, horn-rimmed glasses in the City by the Bay, and white sneakers in Santa

Monica, steel-clad malts and shiny fries, and the sailor bell-bottoms in San Diego. In this short

story by Updike “The Other”, we are shown an encompassment of about thirty years of the

dichotomies between classic and still east coast principles and the windy styles of the west. In

this short story, there is a fine panorama of the elements and disparities in American life from

essentially the mid-points of the last century. The author employs masterful observations of the

constituents of this time, and masterfully uses literary elements to convey them.

Hollis 2

The essential story line is of a young man and woman meeting in their college days back

in the fifties, engaging in innocent foreplay, but without copulation, as was the tendency of those

that would stay true to the mores of the time; she merely ‘parades’ naked under his admiring eye.

Then a revelation that the love of the man has a twin sister. The young couple get married, and

the unmarried other twin sister attends, and it begins to become apparent that the man develops a

strange and ambiguous fascination with the Other. There is foreshadowing of tension that may

come. He was raised poor and his new wife rich. Updike presents here the aspects they share

and do not share in common. At the consummation of the wedding, from the champagne

delirium, the other twin is there, and urges on the man, while the original twin peals in pain. The

other twin, called Susan, also marries, and resides in California. Both couples have three

children, but when the gender composition of the offspring differs, the procreation stops. The

couples visit each other over some years and the differences in their cultures becomes more and

more apparent. The obsession of the man with the twins grows. As the years go by and the

children adolesce, and the couples grow older, the evolving characteristics of everyone are

revealed. The California sister begins to have marital problems with her Mexican husband of the

flabby belly and unfounded optimism. She visits the eastern couple with some of her children

and now appears frazzled and thin. The man’s obsession on her expands. The man goes along

on a day trip with his sister-in-law and children. But the California twin simply returns to the

west. Then the bad times hit; a recession and desperate illegalities take their toll, and the western

couple divorce, while the man of the east begins to argue more and more with his wife twin. He

has lost his law job and after several verbal jabs the eastern couple divorce as well. He relocates

to Westwood, CA and takes a low law job and an apartment. The man runs into a niece from the

California twin and he gets the address of the twin. Some letter writing commences and he goes

Hollis 3

to Berkeley to visit her. This sister is now into ceramics and skinniness. At dinner they share

reminiscences and grievances from over the years. They feel the eastern sister, the other sister, is

just an empty cavern surrounding their talk. They both begin to tire, a shared tiredness form over

the years. They are an odd couple and an old couple of in-laws, come together over the choppy

terrain of all the years and travails. They acknowledge the complicated vibrations that have been

between them all the years. They are considering of course making love, but she is hesitant as to

her role in that, and he simply allows her to just “parade” chastely, as the other sister (his ex-

wife) once did at the beginning. A full circle of irony.

As with LeGuin, Updike has a style that offers themes of a dichotomic nature, where

authority and the decadence of conformity conflict with or are compared to the subordinate and

the sweet nobility of rebellion. The title, “The Other” seems quite appropriate in that the

dichotomies represented, such as the style differences between west and east regions of the

United States, the relationships between male narrator and the twin sisters, one being his wife,

and the other being her twin, the comparisons of their children, and of the narrator and the other

twins husband, and the turmoil and conflicts of principles that the main characters feel, reflect an

idea of ‘another thing’, the other side of a coin.

In order to fulfill an encompassing view of life and the lives of those in the tale, Updike

employs the third-person omniscient point of view and narration style. A first person usage may

have been acceptable, but probably not as effective. The concentration from just one perspective

would not be as valuable as a mature, detached viewpoint that sees all the nuances and subtleties

that no one character on the stage can see reliably. Each of the prominent characters in the story

have their own unique issues and colorful points of view. Updike’s clever perceptions of

Hollis 4

characteristics in the American citizens of our middle class culture are nicely framed in this

sociological song of life.

Updike was known to often present characters who were in response to conflicts

regarding religion, family, and marriage. He has been described as having, “shrewd insight into

the sorrows, frustrations, and banality of American life”. (Hunter) The two twin sisters were

encouraged to be, and seen as different, and yet the perceptions of them turned out wrong. The

eastern twin was once perceived as the more artistic one, while the western twin as more

practical and scientific. This before their coast-to-coast gap. However, as it turns out it is just

the opposite in essence. This misperception of the girls is a nice example of the complexities of

people’s characteristics, and Updike is showing how easy it can be to misunderstand people’s

true natures.

The man, who is called Rob, seems to be of a kind that as a youth developed some

conflicting attitudes and doubts for the belief system he was born into. He has a traumatic

experience at a baptism, and this is somewhat of a contributor to his maturing dilemma towards

his inherent puritan proclivities. His motives often seem to be towards making up something,

and so possibly towards achieving a sense of accurate perception of the apparent world and the

ideal world. His wife, Priscilla, has come more from an affluent family, and has the privilege

and pomp that suits her rather vapid verities. This exotic other twin, mysterious at first, comes

into our minds as possibly the more majestic and dominant one, blowing in breezily from the far

reaches of the wild, wild, west. But blowing in from the wind she is as a feather in the wind, and

later in her life, as the ravages of a reckoning life have taken a toll, any dominance she may have

had becomes gaunt and feebler, although her majesty may remain.

Hollis 5

Updike’s tone for this story seems to be one of reserved respect for protestant principles

and their lofty ideals, but it also suggests an understanding of the raw and alluring attraction of a

grittier life and a respect for the more mundane. Even Updike himself had once said that his

style is an attempt, “to give the mundane its beautiful due”. (Updike) The tone is also one of

smooth and clear observation of common events in average, middle-class Americans lives.

There is no distinct slant from the omniscient narrator towards any attitude that fanatically

promotes a principle. There is just simple awareness and conveyance of delicious details and the

delicate dilemmas that life often delivers. The mood throughout the story is of a gentle and

sympathetic relay from the narrator regarding the joy of bringing the common into the

uncommon. It is of the sheer joy the author feels in having a chance to tell his friends the readers

all of the delicacies of imagery that are in life.

It is apparent that Updike loves the use of imagery, and he does it as a master, and

gracefully. This penchant towards visual construction can be traced to his days of youth, when

his own mother as an aspiring author, impressed him with her efforts and the equipment she

used. As he describes, “One of my earliest memories", he later recalled, "is of seeing her at her

desk. I admired the writer's equipment, the typewriter eraser, the boxes of clean paper. And I

remember the brown envelopes that stories would go off in—and come back in.” (Barrett). He

also was an aspiring cartoonist early on. (Heer) Evidence of keen observation and accurate

imagery can be seen when the wedding occurs in the story, and the sisters in their dresses are

described as ‘majestic in white tulle, and rather mousy in mauve taffeta’. It is also interesting

here in how Updike does not identify the sisters in this passage, but nevertheless, because of the

impression he has already given of them, we can still discern who is who. The majestic one is

the California girl, and the mousy one is the East Coast girl (his wife). Later on, there is also

Hollis 6

nice description of the Mexican husband for Susan, as a builder of ‘million dollar homes’, jovial

and bearded, full of life, and a mysterious ancestry. He is unabashed and has a pendulous belly,

and he “descends to them like a hairy Neptune”(Updike 499) as he enters the hot tub with them,

and then his manhood drifts under Rob’s eyes like a “lead-colored fish swimming nowhere”.

(Updike 499) In a later part of the story, when the western sister is visiting, and is in the throes

of marital trouble, she is nicely described in her challenged state. Updike helps me see her as a

vision of chastity, frazzled, and with drooping hair, and eating a desperately gaunt breakfast of

granola and grapefruit. Later, the author has a nice passage where he refers to “golden slashed

hills interwoven with ocean and lagoons”, and then a very cogent expression towards the

difference between Northern California and Southern, where it is claimed that the north is an

enchanted land of eternal spring, and the south, where the man lives now, one of blander and

perpetual summer.

Updike has also been known for his occasional bold and daring language usage. In the

story towards the end he is describing Susan’s ceramics as “oddly lovely things”.(Updike 505),

the association of an adverb with an adjective of similar style.

John Updike’s personal style for writing was surely formed from his emergent days into

adulthood. These days of the now old-fashioned and quaint 1950’s, were his initial inspiration.

Apparently born to be a writer, he slipped into these times with their hush-puppy loafers and the

Harvard-Yale leather pads, with charred brick factories, great stone churches, Dutch elms and

sweet sweatered girls, and with the valedictorian’s roadster, as it was then in New England.

Anybody from all that might want to be a writer. This story of “The Other”, reflects a changing

time in our history, a time of many changes; that of the middle 20th Century. A tale of a man

affected by these changing times. A man and also two provocative twin sisters, intertwined in

Hollis 7

their pursuits of the real and the ideal. Here at the end then, the man reasons that despite the

complexity between them all before, things can just be simple, and to essentially just take it easy

(the Eagles-like take it easy, California style) an apparent defiance to the Plato doctrine that the

apparent world is illusory and that ideas are the absolute.

Hollis 8

Works Cited

Barrett, Andrea (14 January 1990). "Nibbled at By Neighbors". The New York Times. Retrieved

7 May 2010.

Heer, Jeet (March 20, 2004), "John Updike's animated ambitions", The Guardian.

"John Updike - Introduction" Contemporary Literary Criticism Ed. Jeffrey W. Hunter. Vol. 139.

Gale Cengage 2001 eNotes.com 30 Jul, 2016

Updike, John (2004), The Early Stories: 1953–1975, Ballantine Books.

Updike, John. "The Other." The Norton Anthology of Contemporary Literature. Ed. R. V. Cassil.

2nd ed. N.p.: W.W. Norton &, 1998. 493-507. Print.