Is this short story serious or is it supposed to be a parody of the plotless epiphany story? Would this even have gotten published if it did not have the name John Updike attached? It just seems so lazy - a mere exercise in craft with nothing to say.
bump
Yeah, that story is pretty ???. It’s clearly supposed to be about the liminality of an electrical outage, but it doesn’t seem to have much to say. For a story where the focal point was the gratuitous “twist”, the nature of that gotcha couldn’t have been more obviously-coming.