The Music School by John Updike

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, and that perhaps imaginary and certainly elusive scent that wool, whether in the lapels of a jacket or the nap of a sweater, seems to yield when the cloudless fall sky like the blue bell of a vacuum lifts toward itself the glad exhalations of all things. This fragrance, so faint and flirtatious on those afternoon walks through the dry leaves, would be banked a thousandfold and lie heavy as the perfume of a flower shop on the dark slope of the stadium when, Friday nights, we played football in the city.

First of all, that's the smallest clear image of the cover I could find (though it's not the cover of my edition), so keep your comments to yourself. (Zach edit: Cover image has been corrected and author has been warned.)

Up top in italics are the first two sentences of this collection (and currently comprise the entirety of my Favorite Quotes section on Facebook...whatever). Yes, two sentences. Go back and see for yourself. They come from the story In Football Season. The recently departed Updike has always been famous for this type of high-style prose, and he is a master of it. In fact, he has been often criticized for focusing so much on style that it sometimes takes away from plot. Harold Bloom, whom I respect immensely (the man is clearly a genius) but with whom I sometimes disagree, went so far as to call him "a minor novelist with a major style." While I can't speak to his novels, as I've never read any of them, I can say that I thoroughly enjoyed this collection, one of his lesser known. I had been wanting to read an Updike book for a long time, and came upon this one at an amazing book sale. That's why I chose this one as opposed to Trust Me, The Same Door, Pigeon Feathers, or the recently released My Father's Tears and Other Stories.
Let's remember that to be called a major stylist by one of the world's foremost literary critics and theorists is nothing to sneeze at, even being called a minor novelist in the same breath. One thing is for sure: Updike can write a sentence. And in my opinion the man can write a story. I can certainly understand why people say his plots are pretty lightweight. There basically isn't one in In Football Season, as well as The Morning or Leaves. However, I absolutely loved the first and the last of those, and the other wasn't bad. The only story that I truly didn't like was The Indian. It just seemed sort of pointless. But I did read it in the dark in a bed in a dorm room when I was exhausted, so I may have missed a lot.
I read the first three stories of the book while still in school and just recently picked it up and read the rest. Some of my favorites, other than the ones mentioned, are Giving Blood, The Bulgarian Poetess, Harv is Plowing Now, Twin Beds in Rome, and The Christian Roommates. Mr. Updike claims that he never thought of how he wrote as style. Rather, he just wanted to make things perfectly precise. My friends, he does just that. There are so many moments when you'll know exactly what he means and think that you were the only one who saw it that way. Lightweight plots sometimes (but by no means always), but complex characters (Frank Bascombe is sometimes thought of as the new Rabbit Angstrom (who is not a character in any of these stories, but I just thought I'd mention that as it is an Updike character)) and wonderfully rich and precise sentences.