Word: edens
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: during 1970-1979
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
Updike subtitles the novel "a romance," an artistic sleight of hand by which he allows himself the generous introduction of coincidences. The resonances of the original romance, the Garden of Eden parable, are plentiful. Jerry is a sort of suburban Adam, hopelessly in love, tempted to make his passion public and thereby cross the threshold into the "new morality." Sally, for her part, reveals herself to be the bad Eve as the action progresses; essentially sinful, she demonstrates her greediness and her poison. Beneath her pious confessions of concern for the feelings and future of Ruth and her children...
...trying to maintain her marriage, her family and her sanity, and succeeds to the point of knowing at the end that she doesn't really need the marriage at all. She is alone in her growth; the others stagnate or deteriorate. Jerry, unable to make his move out of Eden, dreams of proposing to Sally; Sally degenerates into a shrew; and Richard is doomed to perpetual unhappiness, neurotically in love with a woman who despises...
...Lust and Eden...
...friendliness and a joy in simple pleasures -and simple ideas. It is row upon row of churches, Maginot-like bastions against the Forces of Darkness. It is the Darkness as well: a lust for guilty, drunken excess. And, perhaps most memorably, the South is sudden visions of Eden, like crossing the Black Warrior River in Alabama at dusk and looking down to see the Peaceable Kingdom, painted in gold and rust...
Seventeenth century England was much taken by Sir Walter Raleigh's description of an American demi-Eden where it was forever either spring or summer. This balmy land of the blest, he said, lay on the 35th parallel of north latitude-in present-day North Carolina. Rallying to Raleigh, for whom North Carolina named its capital, Southerners have ever since believed in their hearts that their region is kindlier, lovelier and more conducive to the good life than any other patch of earth this side of paradise, and not without reason...