Part one of term paper
John Updike tells good stories in his new collection, "Pigeon Feathers." What's more -- or, rather, what helps to make them good -- is his conspicuous devotion to the perilous marksmanship of words. All readers are bound to be grateful to him for that. He is no Pater and he is no Joyce. Clichés and banalities he knows, have their valued uses ...

Part two of term paper
... situation. He speaks, for example, of an encounter with a very junior doctor, "not much older than myself but venerable with competence and witnessed pain." He skips the bits about the smell of hay and harnesses to tell us, with Thoreauvian precision, that: "A barn, in day, is a small night." In his own words about words he reminds us of the "curious and potent, inexplicable and irrefutable magical life language leads within itself" -- not entirely unaided, of course, by wide margins, Devonshir ...