This well-known short story appears in Pigeon Feathers and Other Stories, one of John Updike's earliest books and is narrated by a divinity student at his summer job. From the heights of his wooden throne, the fastidious and aloof young narrator delivers a silent sermon addressed to the beachgoers—"the middle-aged, burdened with children and aluminum chairs." Though full of himself and his mission, he appeals to us by virtue of his earnestness and promise, and the call for which he waits. Updike reads with a tender, ironic understanding of his haughty hero.
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“Updike is not merely talented; he is bold, resourceful, and intensely
serious…We hear talk now and then of a breakthrough in fiction, the
achievement of a new attitude and hence a new method; something like
that seems close at hand in Pigeon Feathers.”
—
Saturday Review