SSRJ #4- Updike-Summer

If you feel this story was a nice love story with a heartfelt message about young love and innocence, you may not like what I am about to say. Updike’s attempt at writing what he considers a love story falls short of developing what I consider to be a real love story. When I think of romance and a love story, I see two people falling in love, facing some difficulties and dealing with the circumstances of their relationship. As I read “Summer” I saw Homer as holding an infatuation with Sandra, almost to a point of stalking. In the early part of the story it tells how he was watching her tan on the dock and it became almost disturbing to read how he would notice every line, every shade, and every movement she made. Growing up there were times where I was infatuated with a friend’s sister, but it was merely childish crushes and some fun, harmless flirtations, not a love story. This so called love story was a unilateral affection that was 99.5% about how he felt about her. At the very end they were lying on opposite ends of the couch and she rested her foot on his back by accident and it stayed there. That was the only indication throughout the whole story that she was vaguely noticing him at all. That doesn’t classify as a true love story to me. If she would have acknowledged she also had feelings for him, it would have made a better story. It would have shown that his silent love was returned with an open expression of her love for him.
Additionally Updike’s writing in this story is full of hyperbole with his constant over exaggeration of the settings and the actions of the characters. I found myself attempting to wade through his long winded explanations of such simple scenes of the porch and the dock. In the third paragraph he starts out with “From the cool darkness of the porch, smelling faintly of moldy books and kerosene and the tobacco of burning pipes, he sat looking through the screen to the lake, shimmering beneath the heat of a summer afternoon; a dog lay sleeping in the sun………”. I translated “A kid was sitting on a smelly old porch with a dog”. It didn’t make me stop and try to imagine what that scene was like, it made me want to “speed read” to the next paragraph.
I understood that Updike was trying to use the seasons to describe the situation with Homer, but I would have enjoyed a story with scenes and descriptions simply stated, not one in which I had to use a thesaurus just to get through it. I consider myself a romantic and enjoy a good romance novel or story such as Nicholas Sparks’ books, but “Summer” did not bring out any emotion in me other than an irritation and a need to classify Homer as just a creepy lonely dude with a crush on his friend’s sister.