A&P by John Updike (Summary and Review) - Minute Book Report

This is a quick summary and analysis of A&P by John Updike. This channel discusses and reviews books, novels, and short stories through drawing...poorly.

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This is a story about an eighteen year old guy named Sammy who works at A&P, a small grocery store near Boston. As he is working at the checkout lane, he notices three girls in bathing suits walk in.

It's a slow day in the store and so he continues to watch them as they shop. The girls come to his checkout lane and he rings them up. However, his manager, Lengel, notices the girls and tells them that they need to cover themselves. The girls are embarrassed and leave.

Seeing this, Sammy quits his job and exits the store hoping that the girls will see how heroic he is for quitting. But by the time he leaves the store, the girls have driven off and he is left with no job.

This is an example of an "everyday life" story, where an everyday event is snapshotted and cropped for the purposes of highlighting the everyday. In this case, the everyday event is working at a grocery store.

In a sense, this story is about authorship. As the girls are walking through the store, Sammy begins to create a backstory for them. He tries to piece together why they are there and dressed the way they are, since the nearest beach is five miles away and most people who go to the beach normally cover up once they leave the beach.

But why would Sammy quit over this? We see, through Sammy, a young man who is trying to be noble, but going across it the wrong way.

Part of it may be that he wants to leave his town life and be invited into the life of the rich and comfortable, the life that he thinks the girls live. And so his attempts to impress the girls are also a gesture for class mobility.

Either way, in the end, he looks like the fool, a jobless fool.

Through Minute Book Reports, hopefully you can get the plot and a few relevant discussion points in just a couple of minutes.

Music by WingoWinston from newgrounds.com.