In this parody of a metropolitan cocktail party, the guests are various species of ravenous, microscopic pond life and literary ambition is transformed into a stark Darwinian struggle. Updike once wanted to be a cartoonist; the original version of this jeu d’espirit, with its tipped-in artwork, zestfully aspires to that condition. It’s a shame, I think, that he decided to omit the illustrations in this and several similar experiments when they were published in the first slab of his collected oeuvre.
First published in The Transatlantic Review, Spring 1968. Collected in Museums and Women, and Other Stories, Knopf, 1972 and The Early Stories 1953 – 1975, Knopf, 2003
A Personal Anthology 