What's the name of this John Updike story?

August 21, 2013 4:26 PM

The other day a stranger described a John Updike short story to me that I'd like to read. He said that the story was called "f-stop" and it was about a detached family man who was taking photos of his kids at the beach (?) but was so focused on his photography that his children ended up drowning as he watched. I have been unable to find any mention of an Updike story called "f-stop" online or any other story that fits this description.
posted by timsneezed to Media & Arts (7 answers total)

This does not ring any bells for me and doesn't sound like an Updike story. How sure are you that he is the author? Rabbit, Run has a child drowning in it and Rabbit at Rest has a near-drowning in it.
posted by jessamyn at 4:35 PM on August 21, 2013

This doesn't sound like Updike to me, either. It does sound vaguely like Cheever's The Swimmer, in that both are about detached family men who are radically missing the point.
posted by PhoBWanKenobi at 5:16 PM on August 21, 2013 [2 favorites]

In Updike's The Day of the Dying Rabbit -- a meditation on family life from a father's point of view -- the protagonist is a photographer, and part of the story plays out on a beach, but the only death is that of a poor creature dragged in by the family cat.
posted by virago at 5:43 PM on August 21, 2013

I've only read a reasonable fraction of his output, but this isn't anywhere in the Wikipedia bibliography of his works, and none of the titles found in any of the collections linked her resembles "f-stop". I will take a stab at plausibility -- to me it sounds a bit more melodramatic than Updike usually went for.

I'm wondering whether this person confused Updike with another author -- e.g. Cheever, as they wrote in similar modes about similar middle-class characters, although both hated the comparison; or John O'Hara, another contemporary cited with them; or someone else entirely. Updike also reviewed literature for the New Yorker, and the New Yorker published many works of short fiction including many of Updike's, so the possibilities for a fuzzy memory here are pretty rife.
posted by dhartung at 12:50 AM on August 22, 2013

I remember in Nicholson Baker's book about Updike, U and I, there's a part where he discusses how in (I'm pretty sure) Updike's novel Of The Farm, the narrator is constantly seeing things through photography metaphors/concepts, including f-stop. "The Day of The Dying Rabbit" sounds more likely to be the (somewhat mis-remembered) story, though.
posted by raisindebt at 5:54 AM on August 22, 2013

Response by poster: Update. Spoke to the guy again today and he said the story appears in an out of print Updike collection called Museums and Women. I'm unable to find the list of stories it contains online. Any idea?
posted by timsneezed at 7:15 PM on August 22, 2013

OK, the table of contents appears on Amazon's site for Museums and Women if you click the Look Inside! feature. There is no listing for a story with the title "f-stop". The Kindle edition is $11.99.

At least some of these stories are also in The Early Stories: 1953-1975, but perhaps not all. In any case that book's index (with dates of first publication) shows no story by that title, either. A search of that book's text for relevant terms (e.g. camera, beach) doesn't come up with anything that looked to me like it matched the description.
posted by dhartung at 4:59 AM on August 23, 2013