By Jim Higgins of the Journal Sentinel. Reading the John Updike stories in chronological order has helped me grasp how much of being a visual artist he brought into his fiction -- not just the descriptive power, but also the visual artist's comfort of working variations on the same theme or subject over and over again.
It is the most comic story in this sequence so far. Kenneth Harris, this story's philandering husband trying to make good, is not exactly a charmer kudos again to Updike for rendering these guys as they are and not shining them up. He's a magazine illustrator whose work falls somewhere between Norman Rockwell and Jon Whitcomb:.
Kenneth, his wife Janet and their three young children seven to two years old have suddenly decamped to the south of France in November. Janet knows a little school French but is shy about using it; Kenneth knows almost nothing. Eventually they find a villa in Antibes and hire a local babysitter, Marie, a widow of about It's an awkward transition for all.
The children, used to teenage and grandmotherly babysitters back home in Boston, keep their distance from Marie, and Janet has difficulty communicating with her. When Janet goes to the museum in Antibes one afternoon, Kenneth sets up in the field outside the villa to sketch, but the children ignore Marie, follow him out to the field and make it impossible for him to work.
Back in the house, Kenneth has a brainstorm: let's have a French lesson. Marie obliges, and soon Kenneth is coaxing the kids to say " le crayon " and " un livre. A halting conversation about where the Harris family is from leads Marie to pose a logical question: Why did you come to France?
