A&P / THE ROTIFER

John Updike’s “A & P” takes place in 1990, towards the end of the Cold War.

• True

• False

Two or three times, Sammy compares the store’s usual customers to

• inmates

• barnyard animals

• circus performers

• politicians

Sammy seems disappointed to see “old McMahon” looking after the three swimsuit-clad girls and “sizing up their joints.” This is arguably doubly ironic, first because McMahon is a butcher and knows something about “joints,” second because

• the girls have no idea they are being sized up

• the beach is five miles away

• Sammy is also checking them out

Answer explanation

Irony can be tricky, or at least the understated kind shown here, where the text means more than what it says.  Overstatement (hyperbole) is comparatively simple, merely exaggeration.  Two of these options are too literal to be ironic; the third, like McMahon’s occupation, we’re supposed to understand, without having to be told.  With that said, even literal statements can be interpreted in more than one way.  Take the fact (directly stated) that the beach is five miles from the store.  Is that near or far?  It’s both.  It’s too far to justify walking into the A&P in swimsuits, but it’s too near when you consider that “there’s people in this town that haven’t seen the ocean in twenty years.”

Something Lengel, the store manager, says strikes Sammy as funny, as if the thought had “just occurred to him.”  What?

• beef is expensive

• this isn't the beach

• you're supposed to be in school

• that's more than 10 items

True or False? When Sammy exits the store, after quitting in protest, the girls have already driven off.

• True

• False

Mary Ladd Gavell’s “The Rotifer” is a story in three parts; the title refers to something in the first part.  What is a “rotifer”?

• a breed of dog

• an old-fashioned farm toot

• a microscopic creature

• a pepper used in salsa

The story contains several allusions – a character in 19^th century fiction (Uriah Heep), a violin virtuoso (Paganini), a famous French chef (Escoffier), and Gulliver.  Who was Gulliver?

• a biblical character famous for his life of suffering

• the protagonist-narrator of an 18^th century satiric novel famous for travels that take him among tiny and gigantic people

• a scientist famous for discovering-inventing the microscope

• no one, but the name has come to be associated with people who are easily deceived, i.e. “gullible”

True or False?  In the second part of the story, when the narrator is doing research in a library archive of the Benton Family, she surmises what must have become of poor Robert Josiah Benton but never has concrete proof.

• True

• False

Answer explanation

I suppose I don’t have to tell you what common thread runs through the three stories, do I?  Okay, I will.  In the first two parts, the narrator wishes she could do something and can’t.  “I am separated from him forever by my monstrous size, and there is no way I can get through from my dimension to his,” she says of the rotifer.  Of Robert Josiah, she says, “It had all happened in 1832; they were all dead and gone.”  In the third story, she is not prevented from acting.  But does she?

Where does Mary (the narrator has a name in the third part, interestingly the author’s own name) believe she has seen her cousin’s fiancé before?

• serving drinks at a party

• driving a cab

• walking down a Paris sidewalk

• protesting police violence

True or False?  The end of the third part of the story leads us to believe Mary was right about the fiancé but does not say yes or no definitively.

• True

• False