“The Kid’s Whistling” (1955)
Reading John Updike’s Complete Stories
This series is a re-reading of John Updike’s short stories in the wake of the publication of “The Collected Early Stories” and “The Collected Later Stories,” the twin-volume set by the Library of America (2013), edited by Christopher Carduff. Updike wrote some 230 stories in five and a half decades. The commentaries include the Maple and Bech stories, most of which are excluded from the Library of America edition in anticipation of a subsequent volume collecting those. Contact the editor for questions, debates or corrections. A hyperlinked list of the compete stories appears below.
[Written in Oxford, England, and rewritten in Pennsylvania, “The Kid’s Whistling” was published in the Dec. 3, 1955 issue of The New Yorker, collected in The Same Door, The Early Stories, and the Library of America’s Collected Early Stories.]
As in “A Sense of Shelter” four years later, “The Kid’s Whistling” finds the protagonist cozy inside a place of work (as opposed to a school in “Shelter”) while it’s raining outside (it snows in “Shelter”), all of which the protagonist finds deliciously enjoyable” Rain was Roy’s favorite weather, and he never felt more at rest, more at home, than when working nights in his hot little room on the third floor of Herlihy’s–the department store stretching dark and empty under him, the radio murmuring, maybe the rain tapping on the black skylight, the engines shuttling back and forth in the Fourth Street fright yard, half a mile away.” The loveliness of the detail is as precise as the opening paragraph of “A Sense of Shelter,” one of Updike’s great feats of prose.
It’s the Christmas season. Roy is logging overtime hours at the toy counter of a department store. But the sanctum is not all his. He has a helper, Jack. Jack won’t stop whistling. Roy tries various stratagems to get him to stop, but he’s not confrontational. He’s painting a sign for the toy department, each letter requiring great care, almost a touch of artistry. Then his wife shows up. She seems more of an interruption than Jack. We remember the line in the opening paragraph: he feels more at home in his workshop than at home. She asks questions What’s this? What’s this for? When are you coming home? It’s a nagging accumulation of subtle bothers. “Don’t let me disturb you,” she tells him, feeling rejected. “Time and a half, you know. I can founder out on my own.”
Back at work, Roy notices that one of the latter letters he painted, while his wife was there and after she’d left, is “too plump, slightly out of scale and too close to the end.” He knew why the job was ruined: “The kid had stopped whistling.”
Funny, well observed, John O’Hara like, and as with most John O’Hara stories, a bit short of memorable. It’s one of those themed stories The New Yorker seemed happy to use in the run-up to the Christmas holiday, enough to please the magazine’s many department store advertisers.
John Updike: The Complete Stories (Click on Links for Summaries and Analyses)
| Title | |||
|---|---|---|---|
| Ace In the Hole | |||
| Friends From Philadelphia | |||
| A Game of Botticelli | |||
| Tomorrow and Tomorrow and So Forth | |||
| Dentistry and Doubt | |||
| Snowing in Greenwich Village (The Maples) | |||
| The Kid's Whistling | |||
| Toward Evening | |||
| Who Made Yellow Roses Yellow | |||
| Wife-wooing (The Maples) | |||
| Giving Blood (The Maples) | |||
| Twin Beds in Rome (The Maples) | |||
| The Bulgarian Poetess (Bech) | |||
| Bech in Rumania | |||
| Bech Takes Pot Luck | |||
| Rich in Russia (Bech) | |||
| Bech Swings? | |||
| Bech Panics | |||
| Bech Enters Heaven | |||
| The Gun Shop | |||
| Believers | |||
| How to Love America and Leave It at the Same Time | |||
| Nevada | |||
| Sons | |||
| Daughter, Last Glimpse Of | |||
| Ethiopia | |||
| Transaction | |||
| Augustine's Concubine | |||
