In Football Season as a microcosm of Updike's work - and a nod to Dylan

I've been reading a new eccentric-family-on-the-road novel that's received some glowing reviews and blurbs but it's done absolutely nothing for me, so have moved on, as promised, or predicted, in yesterday's post and took a look back at a few Updike stories; almost randomly chose from among some old paperbacks The Music School and read first and last selections therein - the last an odd, for Updike, story called The Hermit, about a young man, the under-achiever in a family of 4 brothers, he becomes a squatter in an abandoned house in some undeveloped woodlands in Eastern Pa. - a good story, but not the best example of Updike's talents, or one might say obsessions. The first story in the collection, In Football Season, is a terrific, very short story and a near-perfect example of how U can just take a moment or memory or scene from his youth and develop it into an "open" story - no real plot line, but just a meditation and a commemoration, much like a poem (or like a passage from Proust, yet more directly emotive). Part of the "joke" of the is that it's not about football at all - Updike recalls walking home from a football game (not necessarily on one particular night but, again, using the Proustian sense of time and a verb tense rare in French and not available in English: In those days we often used to ... ) with some pals, enjoying the night air, the long walk, the distance from the stadium to home (he points out that his school was the first to rent a big stadium in the nearby city, which was a financial success as it drew more football fans - imagine that today); the boys get jaunty and begin singing a familiar song, improvising very slightly racy lyrics: Oh you can't get to heaven ... Notice, then, how these lyrics bring us in touch with the two great Updike obsessions, sex (illicit) and death (looming). Sometimes, the guys would pair off with girls, walk them home, have a furtive kiss in the front porch - all this brought back to U., in mid-adulthood, by the scent of perfume and autumn leaves. After dropping off a girl, he would go to a nearby house where his father, a teacher at the high school, was sitting with two other men sorting the coins and bills collected from the concessions at the game - drinking tall glasses of beer; they offer him ginger ale, and he waits for his father to finish and they drive the 10 miles back to their rural house on the far outskirts (subject of much other U fiction): this brush with adolescent sexuality, and then the contrast with the men sorting money and drinking beer, places the young U. at a crossroads, two worlds that he has glimpses of, tastes of, but has not yet entered - and in a sense may choose between, one or the other, father's path or mother's - all the while knowing that comradeship with the boys, walking home in the dark, singing aloud, is world he will leave - has left, obviously, by the time he writes this story and looks back. His closing paragraph, regretting his lost illusions, is as poignant, maybe more, that Bob Dylan's great lyrics: Ten thousand dollars at the drop of a hat / I'd give it all gladly, if our lives could be like that. They cannot.