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John Updike's Separating

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“I think the most ordinary person’s life is fairly dramatic; all you’ve got to do is follow some people around and look at their existence for 24 hours, and it will be horror. It will just be horror. You don’t need any beginning, middle and end at all. All you have to do is show this one day in maybe this person’s life and it’ll be horror” (Kelman). This quote by James Kelman concerns the short story and attempts to convey the idea that this medium should be about transforming an everyday situation into something extraordinary, as opposed to taking an already extraordinary event such as a robbery in order to turn it into an easily-written tale. Many American short stories, amongst which John Updike’s “Separating” and John Cheever’s “The Swimmer” seem to follow these explications by offering a glimpse of the horror of an ordinary life in order to reach for the answer to the profound questions has always been pursuing. “Separating”, written by John Updike, is set on the “fair” and “brilliant” (637) summer’s day on which Richard and Joan Maples decided to gather their offspring in order to tell them the most horrifying news they would have heard in a long time: that they were separating for the summer. After “all that June the weather had mocked [their] internal misery with solid sunlight” (637), they could no longer keep the news to themselves. What resulted of that was the ghastly dinner during which their children had to come to terms with the fact that their lives would be

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