2 - “Flight,” “His Mother Inside Him,” and “Ace in the Hole”

Summary

ONE OF JOHN UPDIKE's MOST BRUTAL early stories is “Flight” (1959). Its protagonist, Allen Dow, is a recognizable type in Updike's fiction— virtually indistinguishable, in fact, from later, more famous narrators like David Kern and Peter Caldwell—and “Flight,” like so much of Updike's fiction, is thinly veiled autobiography. It is not the first story explicitly set in Olinger, Pennsylvania—a stand-in for Updike's native Shillington—but it is one of the most fully realized of that group. Allen feels like an outsider in his small town because “consciousness of a special destiny made me both arrogant and shy.” The idea of Allen's “special destiny,” as it turns out, comes largely from his mother. One day the two of them sit on a hill overlooking Olinger.

Suddenly she dug her fingers into the hair on my head and announced, “There we all are, and there we'll all be forever.” She hesitated before the word “forever,” and hesitated again before adding, “Except you, Allen. You're going to fly.” A few birds were hung far out over the valley, at the level of our eyes, and in her impulsive way she had just plucked the image from them, but it felt like the clue I had been waiting all my childhood for. My most secret self had been made to respond, and I was intensely embarrassed, and irritably ducked my head out from under her melodramatic hand. (50)

This announcement throws Allen's life into disarray—even more so because his mother “continued to treat me like an ordinary child” in an apparent “betrayal of the vision she had made me share. I was captive to a hope she had tossed off and forgotten” (50). But when he attempts to act like something other than an ordinary boy, she responds violently: “once she did respond to my protest that I was learning to fly, by crying with redfaced ferocity, ‘You'll never learn, you'll stick and die in the dirt just like I'm doing. Why should you be better than your mother?’” (50). In other words, Mrs. Dow creates an incredibly powerful, if only potential, future for her son, and then she both expects and does not expect him to live in it.