The Music School

by John Updike

The Music School is a place of learning, in which a sheltered South Dakota boy meets his roommate at Harvard, a rebel with whom he will have a violent—and ambiguous—physical encounter; a warring married couple, Richard and Joan Maple, try and try again to find solace in sex; and Henry Bech, an unprolific American writer publicizing himself far from home, enjoys a moment of improbable, poignant, untranslatable connection with a Bulgarian poetess. In these twenty short stories, each evidence of his early mastery, John Updike brings us a world—a world of fumbling, pausing, and beginning again; a world sensitively felt and lovingly expressed; a world whose pianissimo harmonies demand new subtleties of fictional form.

Genres: Fiction, Short Stories, Contemporary

272 pages, Hardcover

First published August 12, 1966

About the author

John Hoyer Updike was an American writer. Updike's most famous work is his Rabbit series (Rabbit, Run; Rabbit Redux; Rabbit Is Rich; Rabbit At Rest; and Rabbit Remembered). Rabbit is Rich and Rabbit at Rest both won Pulitzer Prizes for Updike. Describing his subject as "the American small town, Protestant middle class," Updike is well known for his careful craftsmanship and prolific writing, having published 22 novels and more than a dozen short story collections as well as poetry, literary criticism and children's books. Hundreds of his stories, reviews, and poems have appeared in The New Yorker since the 1950s. His works often explore sex, faith, and death, and their inter-relationships.

He died of lung cancer at age 76.

Reviews

[Vit Babenco · Rating 5 out of 5]

The Music School… The stories of adolescence… The stories of youth… Tales of the youth gone…

Do you remember a fragrance girls acquire in autumn? As you walk beside them after school, they tighten their arms about their books and bend their heads forward to give a more flattering attention to your words, and in the little intimate area thus formed, carved into the clear air by an implicit crescent, there is a complex fragrance woven of tobacco, powder, lipstick, rinsed hair…

An Indian around town… A husband and wife’s trip to donate blood… A young American philologist in London…

The city overwhelmed our expectations. The Kiplingesque grandeur of Waterloo Station, the Eliotic despondency of the brick row in Chelsea where we spent the night in the flat of a vague friend, the Dickensian nightmare of fog and sweating pavement and besmirched cornices that surrounded us when we awoke – all this seemed too authentic to be real, too corroborative of literature to be solid.

John Updike certainly could wield language.
The aftermath of divorce… An apparition of an old love affair… A voluntary expatriation… Unhappy marital coexistence…

Bleeding, mangled, reverently laid in its tomb a dozen times, their marriage could not die. Burning to leave one another, they left, out of marital habit, together. They took a trip to Rome.

Adulterous Tristan and Iseult of today… Lost love… A homosexual’s evening in the bar… A peculiar roommate in the university… Visiting a psychoanalyst… Learning music… Sharps and flats…
So stories go on… So life goes on…

I look up, and the stars in their near clarity press upon my face, bear in upon my guilt and shame with the strange, liquidly strong certainty that, humanly considered, the universe is perfectly transparent: we exist as flaws in ancient glass. And in apprehending this transparence my mind enters a sudden freedom, like insanity; the stars seem to me a roof, the roof of days from which we fall each night and survive, a miracle. I await resurrection.

Human beings are like stardust scattered throughout the infinity.

[Lobstergirl · Rating 2 out of 5]

Updike just leaves me cold. I can't say I've really liked anything I've read, even his New Yorker criticism. It's strange, because in TV interviews he's so interesting, well-spoken, likable. I want so badly to like his writing because he's handsome and debonair. But this story collection was torture. Giving it twice as many stars as my actual enjoyment level.

[Jay Schutt · Rating 3 out of 5]

I love Updike's writing and his way with words, but these stories just didn't click with me.

[Bob Newman · Rating 4 out of 5]

An Uneven Collection

John Updike at his best is hard to beat. The gem-like brilliance of his observatory powers dazzle me. His choice of words, the power of his phrasing all can leave me amazed. How could anyone write like that ? And at such a young age too. Certain stories in this collection from the 1960s took my breath away. "A Madman", about an encounter with an extremely eccentric Englishman on a first trip to Oxford not only captures the feel of Americans out of their culture, of English life, and the old ways of that university town, but also of all such encounters with persuasive crazies anywhere in the world. Unbelievably good. I loved the 1950s, small town feel of such stories as "The Indian" and "In Football Season", which will serve forever as memoirs of the atmosphere of even-now bygone times. The former, about Ipswich, Mass., close to home for me, resonates even more. "The Bulgarian Poetess" too struck a chord with me---the story of a love never taken up, a future glimpsed only through a door never entered. What a writer ! Yet I can't say that I liked all these stories unequivocally. Some of them seemed too much "insider" stuff, fit only for people who shared the same slice of classical knowledge that the writer carries. Others harped a little too dismally on the disappointments and futility of marriage, or the dubious pleasures of adultery---always, in Updike's view---the view of a reluctant puritan---a losing proposition which cannot really bring satisfaction to any party. Couples thrashing around in the sea of inevitability quickly become old hat; if they get nothing but pain out of it, why do they do it so often ? That may be his question too, but I don't think he answers sufficiently. Some of the stories seem to be rather self-indulgent, as if the author said, "You know, I can write a story about anything. Just name the most obscure topic or theme you can think of and I'll write you a story on it. Now watch this !" Cool, but will it have much meaning to others ? These are some of my criticisms. On the whole, though, this collection can provide both pleasure and interest. It is nearly fifty years old, but only few collections written since then can equal it.

[Chris Mays · Rating 4 out of 5]

Only read a couple of short stories by Updike before and found this at our town’s annual book sale over the summer. It was a treat. Already want to reread. I think every story stands alone with little nuggets of wisdom all over the place. What really stood out to me were the deep inner workings of characters in such short stories. Also, it was published in the 1960s when things were changing a lot socially so it was fun imagining what it would be like to read then.

[Andrew · Rating 3 out of 5]

John Updike is widely recognised as one of the great modern novelists, based largely on the critical reputation of his Rabbit tetrad - Rabbit, Run (1960), Rabbit Redux (1971), Rabbit Is Rich (1981), and Rabbit At Rest (1990), the last two for which he won the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction in 1982 and 1991 - and the not-well-known but outstanding novel Couples (1968), about a group of Tarbox professional families who represented middle-income America of the '60s. I have read the first Rabbit novel, which loosely referenced Updike's school and college years in Pennsylvania - and was not impressed. However, Couples, widely believed to be based on Ipswich, Massachusetts, on the north-east coast, where Updike moved with his family in the '60s, was a superb portraiture of middle-class America, and a kind of modern flagship for middle American liberal lifestyle, values and behaviours, with its 'eclectic sexuality and bravura narcissism' (p.167), its religious guilt, and its sheer comfortable American utopian luxury - plus something else. Updike stands easily among those who have painted the American landscape of that era, literal, political, social, psychological, sexual: Mailer, Bellow, Roth, DeLillo, coming to mind; Updike is unarguably the best, certainly the most readable.

So naturally, this selection of stories from the mid-Sixties references both these milieu, from the reminiscence of college football games and the gaggle of mysterious girls they escorted home afterwards ('In Football Season') to the odd portraiture of historical America - European and earlier Native Indian - in 'The Indian', another, oblique view of Tarbox. It helps if you've read some of Updike before, because you not only get the referencing, but the depth of the otherwise fleeting impressionism which was at the heart of a lot of Updike's world and writing. Having spent some time (literarily, not literally) in Tarbox in my late teens and ten years ago, I feel a great attachment to the place, which he evokes in these short stories with acute turns of phrase that draw out the realism of their brief surveys - the hairy wrists of the men counting the money from the football game (p.12); the reminiscence of the elderly clergyman's daughter as a girl in a gingham dress (p.19); the 'famished' sun (p.30) - and rekindle my memories of a kind of wondrous spell amongst the saints and sinners of Tarbox during that visit in Couples.

If Updike was postmodernist, it was towards the experimental end of his writing time (Gertrude and Claudius (2000), for which 'Four Sides Of One Story' might have been a run-up; Seek My Face (2002)). Earlier, it was only in the ouroboros-like selfish thinking of his characters, rather than in the structure of his form. Couples, that first Rabbit novel, are modernist in their linearity and conventional framework: the interiority of the individual within the foundational structure of the family within the close community of the American middle-class within the hierarchical capitalist utopia, on the cusp of that transitional period in the shift away from mass production towards finance capitalism which exploded in the '80s, and of which we see its destruction in the near-future dystopian America of the gloomy Toward The End Of Time (1997).

In these stories, Tarbox is as much a home of plastic toy manufacture as it is a summer retreat for its seasonal migrant population as it is for its Boston-commuting financial services rich. But it also has its drop-outs, its homeless, its peripheral old colonial vestigials, its girls in beachwear and boys in skiffs. It lives, as I think Updike's fondest memories did, in the Tarbox of the '60s, a time when he was full of the bright optimism of a young family man making a living from the thing he loved in a bright new prosperous setting away from the city, a decade of optimism and optimistic agitation in a country entrenched in republican ultra-conservatism and sinister military-industrial hegemonic machinations. Tarbox is the sheen on the soap bubble of American opulence - but it is also a bright, colourful section-slice of America as a nation at the time.

Equally, because many of these stories are reminiscences, reminiscences are essentially ouroboros-like. As Updike expresses in 'The Music School', the short story: 'Vision, timidly, becomes percussion, percussion becomes music, music becomes emotion, emotion becomes - vision.' (p.148). Similarly, with reminiscences, an image triggers a memory, the memory becomes a layer of life, that layer of life represents an emotion, or series of emotions - something gained, something lost, something symbolic, something still alive, or something frozen in time - which is captured by images. There is, in memories, in reminiscences, something pictorial, strung on threads of emotion.

There is also a lightness to the stories which again reinforces that sense of brightness of the world Updike paints, a certain amused confidence in its foibles and eccentricities, evident immediately ('In Football Season'), looked at askance ('The Indian', 'The Hermit'), brightly comic ('Giving Blood'), absurdly farcical ('A Madman'), sadly lonely ('Leaves', 'The Dark'); soaked with terrible lost longing ('The Stare', 'The Morning'), absurdly dramatic ('Four Sides Of One Story', 'At A Bar In Charlotte Amalie' - too absurd to engage), strangely petulant ('The Christian Roommates', 'The Rescue'), falsely staged ('Avec la Bébé-Sitter', 'Twin Beds In Rome', 'My Lover Has Dirty Fingernails'), wistfully metaphysical ('Harv Is Ploughing Now'), of autobiographical circumflexion ('The Bulgarian Poetess'), profoundly optimistic ('The Family Meadow', 'The Music School'). You can see why this collection is named after its deepest musing.

If these brief and disparate reminiscences don't inspire you to read more of Updike - and, appropriately, the right novel first! - then you have come about him the wrong way round. Read Couples, and one of the Rabbit novels (perhaps start with the later couple), and then come back to these stories. Your endeavour and patience will be richly rewarded. Of his generation of writers, who were also commentators on American culture, Updike is the most attractive. Because he brings 'something else' to his pictures of the period, and I can only define that as a form of lasting optimism, a brightness to the sky, whatever its backdrop.

[K · Rating 4 out of 5]

In the MeToo era, this is a hard book to write. As others have noted, the writing is brilliant, crystalline and deeply insightful. It speaks of a lost era of prep school education in the classics and an isolated arrogance that (I'm pleased to say) has been intruded upon by our more diverse social and economic structure.

On the other hand, the stories are relentlessly sad and negative, and they feel very dated. Over and over again, they're about a married man betraying his wife and wanting some type of absolution for his sins. In a few cases, it's the woman who sinned, as if that's somehow more empowering. But in either case, it's a very limited view of the world: One gets married to the wrong person, and then fights with and cheats on that person for years, all the while unable to tear himself/herself away.

In that sense, the stories are repetitive, as well as out of touch with a society that today includes more cohabitating couples and gay couples below age 50 than it does straight marriages. It's also disconcerting that the women are always portrayed for their looks, whether those are very positive or disappointing. In a couple of cases, such as the Bulgarian poetess in one story, the woman is also credited with intelligence, but that's only after her blonde hair and "good legs" are noticed by the lumpy 40-ish male author on the decline.

The best stories? "In Football Season" is both about the feel and smell of a New England fall, but also the voyueristic looks that men direct at teenage girls -- a confessional, so to speak, that rings very true. "Giving Blood" opens with one of the most viciously controlled spousal fights I've ever seen in print, then moves to a reconciliation of sorts, as the husband is put in a weak position (afraid of giving blood), and then crumbles into the old catastrophic pattern at the end. "The Christian Roommates" is fascinating -- Harvard of the 1950s, experimenting with letting in a few Jews, African-Americans and an Indian-American -- seen through the eyes of an utterly conventional white man from South Dakota. He resists most of the culture opening up to him, but nonetheless leaves a changed man. "The Hermit" is almost gothic by the end.

Overall, this is definitely worth a read. The phrasing is elegant, the images indelible. And if it shows a slice of life that probably never existed and certainly wasn't healthy for anyone living it, well, that's a lesson to take home, too.

[Jonathan Henderson · Rating 3 out of 5]

The third short story collection I've read from Updike. Overall I liked it more than his first, but less than Pigeon Feathers. Surprisingly, the standouts here for me were often the shortest pieces, which were more like prose poems than short stories proper. Particularly outstanding was Harv is Plowing Now, a brief (2000 word) gorgeously evocative meditation on the past through the metaphor of archeology, and how loss inevitably leads us to try to excavate and mythology about our own history and how our lives build up through layers that become imperceptible to us in the present. I'm tempted just to post the entire thing because it's probably the finest thing I've read from Updike thus far; though perhaps that's just my own poetic bias showing. Leaves is similar, though even shorter, and not quite as effective: here the meditation is through the lens of nature and reflecting on our bad choices and mistake, the one here leading to a divorce.

The traditional stories were hit-and-miss this time around, but perhaps the longest one, The Christian Roommates, was the best realized. It's about a Harvard freshman named Orson and his relationship with his roommate, Hub, whom he comes to hate, and the other pairs of roommates in their dorms. Though light on the thematic or poetic substance of the above stories, the characters (all of them) are memorably and humorously written. More substantial is the psychology or Orson, of how and why he comes to hate Hub.

This volume also continues Updike's acclaimed "Maple Stories" about the marital struggles and felicities of Richard and Joan Maple in Giving Blood and Two Beds in Rome. Both are charming and ambiguously complex in the way relationships between people who know each other too well tend to be. I know all of these were collected separately and I wonder if it would've been better to read them that way.

Beyond that most of the rest of the collection struck me as middling to mildly interesting. I did enjoy Four Sides of One Story in which all the principal characters in Tristan & Isolde write letters to each other, and The Hermit, about a dude who, after constant power struggles with his family of brothers, decides to live on his own in the woods.

[Caleb · Rating 4 out of 5]

What a wonderful read!

Updike's prose is generally wonderful. Such careful careful placement of words. Such diversity of vocabulary. And such insight into many aspects of the human conditions. One could see this collection as an essay on the human condition at its publication.

That being said, there is a lot of inherent homophobia/anti-feminist material in this writing. There are patently misogynist/homophobic portions of this work, like any other Updike work, unfortunately. It is, in my view, a true misfortune that a great writer such as Updike lacked the empathy to wrap into his narratives these communities.

However, the reading was still enjoyable for me (a professed and proud homosexual). Such wonderfully constructed prose, outside of sexual references. I find myself perpetually repelled by the philosophical aspects of Updike's writing, but positively entranced by his style. If you are able to observe both sides of the coins simultaneously then you are in for a wonderful read with this incredibly collection of character inspections.

[Rick Patterson · Rating 5 out of 5]

Although sometimes Updike's prose is so very very introspective that it seems to hold the reader at a distance--like a friend who is engaged in a really important text, holding up a dissuasive finger that advises you to give him just a moment, please--he is much more often willing to share so much of himself that the whole experience can be rather overwhelming. Obviously, Updike seems endlessly capable of immersing us in the lives of real people who are damaged, damaging, petty, sensitive, and always human. This collection is a constant next surprise, another new insight, another way of seeing and understanding (or misunderstanding) the world.
Then your friend hands you his phone and says, "Read this. Please."

[J. Wootton · Rating 3 out of 5]

Updike is lovely with language, and although he overdoes it sometimes - a few of these short stories feel like pages of elaborated wordplay - on the whole he is a pleasure to read. In this collection, about half is devoted to people divorcing, recently divorced, having affairs, and/or mewlishly contemplating the same; this gets old quick, no matter how well-described.

On the whole, this collection isn't a keeper for me. But it does contain 4 stories worth recommending: "A Madman", "The Christian Roommates", "The Bulgarian Poetess", and "The Hermit." Let me know if you read them - they'd be interesting to discuss.

[Paul Hansbury · Rating 2 out of 5]

The good stories were good. But they were fewer than the not-so-good ones. Too much style. Not enough substance.

[Sophie · Rating 5 out of 5]

This is one of the best short story collections I have read in a long while.


"It seemed that he and Joan were caught together in a classroom where they would never be recognized, or in a charade that would never be guessed, the correct answer being Two Silver Birches in a Meadow."

"All my life people have been expecting me to faint. I have no idea why. I never faint."

"Spring infiltrates a city through the blood of its inhabitants."

"He felt as if he were leaning backward, and his mind seemed a kind of twig, a twig that had deviated from the trunk and chosen to be this branch instead of that one, and chosen again and again, becoming finer with each choice until there was nothing left for it but to vanish into air."

"If I had any dignity I'd be dead or insane."

"I remember how I used to read a newspaper and care and it seems like another person."

"I'm really all right, except right now. My fundamental impression I think is of the incredible wastefulness of being alive."

"He escorted a squat powdered woman who looked as though she had put on her lipstick by eating it."

"and the existence of languages other than English, the existence of so many, each so vast, intricate, and opaque, seemed to prove cosmic dementia."

"While of course great caution should attend assertions about evidence so tenuous, so disjointed, and so befouled with the mud of phlegm and fatigue, each fragment seems hollow in the same way; and a kind of shape, or at least a tendency of motion which if we could imagine it continuing uninterrupted would produce a shape, might by hypothesized. But we will be on firmer ground simply describing ther surface layers of days."

"Care is crucial; days, though in sum their supply of rubbish seems endless, are each an ingument of ghostly thinness."

"There was a light above him he could not rise out of the surrounding confusion."

[mark · Rating 3 out of 5]

I enjoyed several of the pieces in this collection of short stories. Updike has a distinctive style and seems to strive for psychological intensity, using really creative imagery in his descriptions. I did get tired of the married-couple-going-through-an-affair story, which he wrote in at least 4 different ways, maybe more that I can´t recall right now. ¨The Christian Roommates¨ was probably the easiest and funniest story, though he didn´t seem to know how to end it. I suspect that he laced all stories with subtle symbolism that I was too impatient or lazy to try to uncover.

[Steven · Rating 3 out of 5]

Some stories were very good and some not-so-good. I think Updike excels when he focuses his writing on the emotions and small/intimate actions of his characters, and that things become overwrought when he tries to write grandiose prose in places.

Stronger stories were 'Christian Roommates,' 'My lover has dirty fingernails,' and 'the Bulgarian poetess.' 'The Hermit' was weaker, as were a few others which I'll get around to naming tomorrow. 'The Dark' was rather interesting, and also for being so markedly different from his other stories in tone and content.

[Ivan · Rating 4 out of 5]

FIRST LINE REVIEW: "Do you remember a fragrance girls acquire in autumn?" Oh, that Updike! I'm always amazed by his ability to reveal so microscopically the everyday, but with a freshness of insight that makes the common appear alien. Often brilliant, often frustrating. Much like this daily walk we all take through life. Good stuff, this. For the patient reader who wants to fine tune his/her sense of smell (along with the other senses).

[Aaron · Rating 4 out of 5]

Some of the work in this collection of Updike stories is spectacular. Favorite stories are the two "Maples" stories - "Giving Blood" and "Twin Beds in Rome". Also impressive are "At a Bar in Charlotte Amalie" and "Have Is Plowing Now". Enjoyed this collection immensely. Updike's consistent command of the language - and his intelligence, and ability to "imagine" scenes outside of his "comfort zone" of thinly-disguised autobiographical stories - is impressive.

[Emer Tannam · Rating 2 out of 5]

I'm giving this two stars because I've already read a lot of John Updike, and there's a limit to how many stories about cheating spouses I can read. This reflects more on me than it does on the book, however.

[E.J. Cullen · Rating 3 out of 5]

Read this years ago and was enthralled. Upon re-reading, still good but maybe just a little too stilted and show-offy for my taste. Updike is still good company though.

[Deborah · Rating 4 out of 5]

Great! insightful

[Jen Knox · Rating 3 out of 5]

Only two of these stories really gripped me. The book is worth reading, if only because no story, no matter how gripless, is devoid of Updikes's brilliant, beautiful way with words.

[Andrew Murawa · Rating 1 out of 5]

I'm just not an Updike fan, short stories or otherwise.

[Lölya he\they · Rating 5 out of 5]

The short novel "The Hermit" from this book changed my life forever.

[Lyle D · Rating 5 out of 5]

THE MUSIC SCHOOL - Short Stories by JOHN UPDIKE (1972)