Word: gracefully
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Dates: during 1960-1969
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JOHN UPDIKE'S new novel, Couples, describes a modern purgatory, a world from which God has withdrawn, a community without grace or light or love. The book, the story of various adulterous affairs among a group of affluent suburban couples, bears an ironic quotation from Paul Tillich that outlines the novel's thesis. The quotation tells us that when the average citizen feels that "the decisions relating to the life of the society to which he belongs are a matter of fate on which he has no influence," then a mood is created that "is favorable to the resurgence...
Love in Tarbox is not a free and unmerited human grace, but a mask of fear. Love-making is for Piet a way of momentarily escaping his haunting fear of death, a way of forgetting the reality of loss, the eventual extinction of consciousness...
...LITTLE DISTURBANCES OF MAN by Grace Paley. 189 pages. Viking...
...fickle culture, British Critic Cyril Connolly once declared, it is ambition enough for any author to set out to write a book that will last ten years. "And of how many books," he asked, "is that true today?" One notable example is this artful, bracing group of stories, Grace Paley's first and, so far, only book. Little noticed when it was published in 1959, it has since won enough readers and impressed enough critics to justify a new edition even before its first decade...
This language is the medium through which Grace Paley builds personality. It provides a salty, descriptive surface for otherwise callow characters such as the novice nymphet in bed with a soldier in A Woman, Young and Old, or the gay but rusting blade of The Contest who thinks he can do without marriage. For the book's best and most typical characters-spunky, passionate women, abandoned by men and saddled with children and poverty-life is a form of coping with the mysteries of love and loneliness...