Ace In The Hole Analysis

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Ace In The Hole Analysis

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Freddy "Ace" Anderson is in a melancholy mood. He has just been fired from his job. On the drive home, he talks to himself and blasts the radio because he cannot bear silence. A Pontiac pulls up next to him at a red light and the teenage driver makes fun of Ace for singing along to the radio. He angrily retorts, calling the kid a “miserable wop” (145) and is pleased when the youth’s car stalls out as the light turns green. This improves Ace’s mood, and he continues on and picks up his infant daughter Bonnie from his mother’s house.
When he arrives, he announces that he has been fired. Ace’s mother is pleased because her son is not upset, and she always thought he worked too hard anyway. However, she speculates that his wife Evey will be furious at him. To Ace’s chagrin, she begins to criticize Evey’s Roman Catholic religion. Although he tries to change the subject, she continues to work jibes about her daughter-in-law into the conversation. Ace's mother also tells him his name was in today's newspaper.
Since his mother lives only half a block from his apartment, Ace leaves his car and jogs home with Bonnie in his arms. He thinks about advice from his old coach - "Never ride when you can walk." Although she wants to play when they get home, he gives Bonnie a rattle and goes to the bathroom to comb his hair alone. He worries about how Evey will react to the news of his firing, and regrets yelling at the teenager in the Pontiac. Ace looks at the morning paper and finds his name. A points record he set as a basketball star five years ago in high school is in jeopardy of being bested by a current student. Ace angrily tosses the paper aside.
Bonnie starts to cry, and Ace turns the television on “to drown her out” (147). He remembers that he also felt depresed in high school, but playing basketball and hanging around in the locker room made him feel better. When Evey gets home from work, she is in a sarcastic mood, teasing Ace and making fun of his mother. She found out from his mother that he has been fired, and does not seem upset with him.
Ace explains to her why he lost his job. His boss, Goldman , had asked Ace to parallel-park Goldman’s Chevy for him. The space was too small for the car, and Ace accidentally grazed another car when he tried to park it. Evey suddenly becomes vindictive, asking Ace what he plans to do now, and mocks his fantasies of becoming a professional basketball player.
When she adds that she is “ready as Christ to let you run” (150), Ace mutters about her Catholic faith, which prohibits divorce. As her parents fight, Bonnie vies for their attention by putting an ashtray on her head. Ace comments that she has sure hands and would make a great athlete if she were a boy. He asks Evey to stay with him so they can have a male child.
Evey wants to talk about the couple’s dire financial problems, but Ace is distracted now. He asks her to have a cocktail and dance. Evey is resistant to all of this, especially Ace’s idea that they should have another child. He forcefully seizes her and begins to dance. Although Evey is tense and uncomfortable, he feels better, remembering his fun times in the locker room in high school.
The title of “Ace in the Hole” is a double entendre, referring to Ace’s problems parallel parking (he calls the parking space as a “hole”) as well as his difficult position in life—he has just been fired; his relationship with Evey is tense; he is consumed with nostalgia for his high-school glory days. These meanings are an ironic play on the origin of the phrase "ace in the hole." In poker, when a player is dealt an ace - the best card in the deck - face down or, "in the hole" he or she has a secret weapon and will likely win the hand. Ace himself has no trump card and all of his plans or grand ideas are dismissed as fantasy by his wife.
The parking scene may seem trivial; after all, the narrator does not even describe it, but rather includes it as part of Ace’s conversation with his wife. However, it serves as an analogy for many of Ace’s problems in life. He describes the parking space as “tight,” an adjective he also uses for the feeling in his stomach, itself a manifestation of his depression. As he recounts the parallel-parking story his wife, he laughs about Goldman’s anger. This is indicative of his general resentment for other people, particularly men. Ace feels as if he is in a tight space in his life.
For Ace, personal fulfillment is a zero-sum game and his own happiness must always come at someone else’s expense. Ace's one joy in the piece comes at the beginning. After Ace gets into a verbal altercation with a kid at a red light, the kid's Pontiac stalls out. Ace takes devious pleasure in this event, likely what he views as retribution for being called "Dad" - an illusion to his faded glory and youth. Ace does feel bad for using a racial slur against the kid, signaling he is not totally hateful. Ace is immature and consumed with victory going hand in hand with loss. This complex, flawed worldview is apparent in the way he describes the car's damage to Evey: “Just looked like somebody took a planer and shaved off the bulge ... at the back,” he says. “The Chevy, though, didn’t have a dent. It even gained some paint.” (149) If one car is damaged, the other car must come out scot-free, and even "gain some paint.” This also serves to pain Ace as nearly "innocent" of his crime. He is not taking responsibility in his life.
Ace and Evey’s parenting style may shock 21st-century readers. Little Bonnie is allowed to play with an ashtray, finally wearing it on her head. Ace regrets that Bonnie was not a boy because he believes girls cannot and should not play sports. Much of this is innocuous and was simply part of the culture in 1950s America. However, Ace and Evey’s disregard for their infant daughter is real; Evey snaps at her to “shut up” and Ace would rather comb his hair than play with her. Bonnie grounds the story in reality and adds a level of gravity to the story that would be missing if her parents were childless. Evey and Ace seem very much like kids themselves, especially as Ace gets fixated on his boyhood basketball record being shattered. They are stuck in a prolonged adolescence that makes them irresponsible and self-involved and they are threatening Bonnie's future as much as their own.
In this story, Updike fabricates some cultural references, inventing a pop song called “Blueberry Hill” and the band that sings it. This is an early stylistic tic that would become increasingly rare over the course of Updike’s career. For example, A & P is a real grocery chain, and “Short Easter” is replete with references to 1980s pop culture. In the later stories, Updike’s painstaking verisimilitude plays into his satire of materialism in popular culture. But in “Ace in the Hole,” commercialism is depicted relatively uncritically. Updike transcribes the advertisement for Emu Shoe Gloss, but it serves to emphasize Ace’s discomfort with silence rather than as an overt critique.
Published in The New Yorker in 1955, "Ace in the Hole" is Updike's first short story and sets a precedent for themes explored throughout his career - the transition from adolescence into the adult world, indifference to authority and self-delusion. Ace is also considered a precursor for Updike's famous character Harry "Rabbit" Angstrom first seen in the 1960 novel Rabbit, Run . Rabbit is 26, a former basketball star also making a difficult transition into adulthood. Like Ace, Rabbit's glory has faded and he finds himself wanting to escape from what he sees as traps of a middle-class life.
The Question and Answer section for A&P and Other Stories is a great
resource to ask questions, find answers, and discuss the novel.

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This story is narrated by Sammy, a young cashier at the supermarket A & P. One day, three girls in bathing suits stop in to buy some snacks. Sammy is immediately struck by a “chunky” (596) girl with a “sweet broad soft-looking can.” He is so...
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A&P and Other Stories essays are academic essays for citation. These papers were written primarily by students and provide critical analysis of A&P and other short stories by John Updike.


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This series is a re-reading of John Updike’s short stories in the wake of the publication of “The Collected Early Stories” and “The Collected Later Stories,” the twin-volume set by the Library of America (2013). A comprehensive table of the complete stories with links to each story summary appears below. The commentaries include the Maple and Bech stories, most of which are excluded from the Library of America edition. Contact the editor for questions, debates or corrections.

[“Ace in the Hole” was published in the April 9, 1955 issue of The New Yorker, collected in The Same Door , The Early Stories , and the Library of America’s Collected Early Stories .]
Just as all of Western literature is contained in the Illiad and the Odyssey , all of Updike’s oeuvre , as he loved to call it, is contained in his first short story, the second to be published by The New Yorker–on April 9, 1955, a few days after Jim Henson creates the first incarnation of Kermit the Frog, and exactly 56 days after Eisenhower sends the first “advisers” to South Vietnam. It’s all there: the restlessness, the exasperating marriage, the protagonist’s colossal self-absorption, the overbearing mother, the constricting wife, the eternal conjugal calculations, the indifferent universe, the affectionate, compulsively described details of ordinary life, the playfulness and love of language.
Also there: Updike’s compulsion for re-editing his works long after they’ve been published or re-published. First written for a creative writing class at Harvard in 1953 and titled “Flick,” The New Yorker at first rejected the story when Updike submitted it as a senior. After the magazine accepted “Friends From Philadelphia,” Updike reworked it and called it “Ace in the Hole.” It was accepted. (Updike, always the clever boy, memorialized “Flick” by changing, in the first line, “snapped on the radio” to “flicked on the radio.”) But it wasn’t reworked beyond the title change and the name change of its protagonist. Updike would edit it significantly more when he prepared it for publication in The Early Stories in 2003, making some changes that look unnecessary, if not literarily pretentious.
It’s the story of an afternoon in the life of Ace Anderson. He’s just been fired from his job at a used car dealer’s for backing a car into another car. On his way home he stops by his mother’s to pick up his infant daughter. His mother is glad he got fired. Gladder still that it’ll create tensions with his wife Evie, whom his mother does not like. “…any time Evey thinks she can do better, there’s room for you and Bonnie right in your father’s house.” In the New Yorker version of the exchange, his mother doesn’t go further. In the revised version, Updike inserted her saying this: “Evie is a wonderful girl of her own kind. But I’ve always said, and your father agrees, Roman Catholics ought to marry among themselves. Now, I know I’ve said it before, but when they get out in the greater world–”
A few paragraphs earlier, the “us-and-them” theme was also edited in in the 2003 version. In the New Yorker version, Ace says of his boss: “He just wanted too much for his money. I didn’t mind working the Saturdays…” In the last version, Updike inserted between the two sentences: That kind does . Meaning Jews. Later in the story, the 2003 version inserts yet another racist line: “He felt sorry he had called the kid in the car a wop.” Catholics, Jews and Italians, all shoveled in Ace’s hole. It makes you wonder: why, after almost fifty years, make three editing changes that are intently bigoted, and that neither add anything to the story nor relate to anything else in the story (a recurring weakness in Updike: detail upon detail is elucidated in one part of a story with no connection whatsoever to other parts, underscoring his mode of describing for its own sake).
After the encounter with his mother, Ace runs home. He lives close enough. It’s the running theme warming up. He dumps his daughter in her crib and goes off to the bathroom to admire himself in the mirror, fussing with his hair. The narcissus theme warming up. Then the encounter with Evey. Ace isn’t taking getting fired seriously. Evey isn’t taking him seriously anymore. “I’m fed up. I’m ready as Christ to let you run.” (“Ah: runs. Runs.” The last words of Rabbit, Run. But Evey is no “mutt,” as Janice was in the early Rabbit books. “I’m not your baby,” Evey says. But the story ends with Ace dancing with her. “Her hair brushed his lips as she minced in, then swung away, to the end of his arm; he could feel her toes dig into the carpet. He flipped his own hair back from his eyes. The music ate through his skin and mixed with the nerves and small veins; he seemed to be great again, and all the other kids were around them, in a ring, clapping time.” It’s the lunge back to golden years, the past always being better than the present, far better than the future.
The story lacks the latter Updike style, the mannered similes and strained metaphors, but it’s taut, brisk, and surprisingly gripping given Ace’s fuck-you attitude. Bad boys are more interesting than tame ones. Updike is warming up our cockles for Harry Angstrom, five years away.




Kirk Douglas plays a cynical reporter who capitalizes on a mine disaster in "Ace In the Hole."




Luckiest Girl Alive


Marya E. Gates


There's not a soft or sentimental passage in Billy Wilder's
"Ace in the Hole" (1951), a portrait of rotten journalism and the
public's insatiable appetite for it. It's easy to blame the press for its
portraits of self-destructing celebrities, philandering preachers, corrupt
politicians or bragging serial killers, but who loves those stories? The public
does. Wilder, true to this vision and ahead of his time, made a movie in which
the only good men are the victim and his doctor. Instead of blaming the
journalist who masterminds a media circus, he is equally hard on sightseers who
pay 25 cents admission. Nobody gets off the hook here.
The
movie stars Kirk Douglas , an actor who could freeze the blood when he wanted
to, in his most savage role. Yes, he made comedies and played heroes, but he
could be merciless, his face curling into scorn and bitterness. He plays
Charles Tatum, a skilled reporter with a drinking problem, who has been fired
in 11 markets (slander, adultery, boozing) when his car breaks down in
Albuquerque and he cons his way into a job at the local paper.
The
break he's waiting for comes a year later. Dispatched to a remote town to cover
a rattlesnake competition, he stops in a desert hamlet and discovers that the
owner of the trading post has been trapped in an abandoned silver mine by a
cave-in. Tatum forgets the rattlesnakes and talks his way into the tunnel to
talk to Leo Minosa ( Richard Benedict ), whose legs are pinned under timbers.
When Tatum comes out again, he sees the future: He will nail down possession of
the story, spin it out as long as he can, and milk it for money, fame and his
old job back East.
Confronted
by a corrupt local sheriff and mining experts, Tatum takes charge by force of
will, issuing orders and slapping around deputies with so much confidence he
gets away with it. Learning that Minosa could be rescued in a day or two if
workers simply shored up the mine tunnel and brought him out, Tatum cooks up a
cockamamie scheme to lengthen the process: Rescuers will drill straight down to
the trapped man, through solid rock.
The
newspaperman moves into Minosa's trading post and starts issuing orders. He
finds that the man's wife, a one-time Baltimore bar girl named Lorraine (Jan
Sterling), has raided the cash register and plans to take the next bus out of
town. He slaps her hard, and orders her to stay and portray a grieving spouse.
He needs her for his story. Even though the film has been little seen and
appeared for the first time on home video last month, it produced one of those
famous hard-boiled movie lines everybody seems to have heard; ordered to attend
a prayer service for her husband, Lorraine sneers, "I don't go to church.
Kneeling bags my nylons."
Wilder
(1906-2002) came to "Ace in the Hole" right after "Sunset
Boulevard" (1950), which had 11 Oscar nominations and won three. Known for
his biting cynicism and hard edges in such masterpieces as "Double
Indemnity" (1944) and "The Lost Weekend" (1945), he outdid
himself with "Ace in the Hole." The film's harsh portrait of an
American media circus appalled the critics and repelled the public; it failed
on first release, and after it won European festivals and was retitled
"The Big Carnival," it failed again.
There's
not a wasted shot in Wilder's film, which is single-mindedly economical.
Students of Arthur Schmidt's editing could learn from the way every shot does
its duty. There's not even a gratuitous reaction shot. The black-and-white
cinematography by Charles Lang is the inevitable choice; this story would
curdle color. And notice how no time is wasted with needless exposition. A
wire-service ticker turns up there, again without comment. A press tent goes up
and speaks for itself.
Although
the film is 56 years old, I found while watching it again that it still has all
its power. It hasn't aged because Wilder and his co-writers, Walter Newman and
Lesser Samuels, were so lean and mean. The dialogue delivers perfectly timed
punches: "I can handle big news and little news. And if there's no news,
I'll go out and bite a dog."
That's
what Tatum does with the Minosa story. Not content with the drama of a man
trapped underground, Tatum discovers the mountain is an Indian burial ground
and adds speculations about a mummy's curse. Soon gawkers are arriving from all
over the country, and those who have arrived to exploit them: hot dog stands,
cotton candy vendors, a carnival with a merry-go-round.
Meanwhile,
Minosa grows weaker and depends on Tatum for his contact with the surface. The
pounding drill, growing closer, tortures him. Rival newsmen complain about
Tatum's role: He controls access to the rescue, the story and the wife. With
every day that passes, the story grows bigger. And Tatum manufactures news on a
slow day. He plunges into the cave with a priest and a doctor, and finds out
from Leo about his anniversary present for the wife who despises him. It's a
fur scarf. Tatum hands it to her and tells her to wear it. She hates it. He
almost chokes her with it. She wears it.
Kirk
Douglas (born in 1916) was and still is a ferocious competitor. Little wonder
one of his first screen roles was as a boxer in "Champion" (1949).
When I interviewed him for Esquire in 1969, the role of a champion was his

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