It was a young pool, only two years old, of the fragile type fashioned by laying a plastic liner within a carefully carved hole in the ground.
“The Orphaned Swimming Pool,” by John Updike
When I read this sentence, the pool instantly came alive like a toddler. Two years old, new to the world, the pool toddled into the story, and I felt I’d met one of the main characters in the story. Indeed, I had.
The pool is the central image in Updike’s story about a marriage that falls apart. Soon the husband and wife flee the scene of their domesticity, but the pool has a life of its own, when the neighbors take it over, swimming and frolicking, with a tide of evening activities, including affairs. Even strangers to the town come to the pool.
Personification is behind the magic, transforming the pool. The inanimate object is made animate by giving it human qualities or abilities. Because personification makes a comparison between the inanimate and the human, it can be viewed as a type of simile or metaphor.
Personification draws attention to the inanimate object and offers the reader a new perspective.
“Personification permits us to use knowledge about ourselves to comprehend other aspects of the world, such as time, death, natural forces, inanimate objects, etc,” writes Zoltan Kovecses in Metaphor: A Practical Introduction.
I love personification because I feel as humans we’ve been too stingy in granting others, including the inanimate, subjectivity.
In Updike’s story, the pool symbolizes the marriage. “They never seemed happier, nor their marriage healthier, than those two summers,” writes Updike, efficiently linking the pool to the state of the marriage. There’s no need to say much about the marriage because the pool and its slowly deteriorating state capture it. Updike lets us know the trajectory of the marriage early on by describing the pool as “the fragile type.” Eventually, the pump breaks, and dead dragonflies gather on the surface, and small, deluded toads hop in and swim around hopelessly.
The Making
The key here is to take an inanimate object and assign to it human qualities or abilities. In Updike’s sentence, he uses the adjective “young” to describe the pool and elaborates on how young—two years old. There is also the title of the story, which gives us a foreshadowing of the pool’s aliveness.
Updike uses a cleft sentence, in which an element in the sentence is moved from its normal spot (in this case the subject) to add greater emphasis. A cleft sentence is made by starting with “it” and following with the verb--usually “is” or “was.” What comes next is the focus of the sentence.
Updike could have written a more traditional sentence: The pool was young, only two years old… but he wanted to emphasize the pool.
Now, add two or three modifiers, making the focus of your sentence sharper and signaling to the reader that the image is important to the story.
Can you add repetition of sounds?
Alliteration: fragile/fashioned; carefully/carved
Assonance: pool/two; only/old/hole; fragile/fashioned/plastic
Give it a try!
What else do you see in this sentence?
(thank you to the subscriber who recommended this fantastic story!!)
Lovely again. Was reading this excerpt from Michael Chabon and I thought you would love the sentences (somewhere between Joan Didion and David Foster Wallace): https://www.npr.org/2010/06/24/113379661/excerpt-manhood-for-amateurs-the-pleasures-and-regrets-of-a-husband-father-and-s
Fantastic. Thank you. I love this imagery.