Word: hanema
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...hero races toward life as if it promised victory: "Out of a kind of sweet panic growing lighter and quicker and quieter, he runs. Ah: runs. Runs." Updike's men are lovers of the here and now and not afraid to look foolish while saying so. Piet Hanema in Couples, Harry Angstrom in the three Rabbit novels, Bech, assorted adolescents and husbands in the short stories: all act in childlike confidence, as if their surroundings have been put there specifically for them to enjoy. In a typical Updike domestic scene, the young people are more cynical than their parents...
...author holds this man in curious affection, as he did Piet Hanema, the star-crossed archadulterer in Couples. The fact seems curious, since most of the sense in the book is given to Ruth. During the marriage she has cared well for Jerry and the children. But she has never taken seriously his asthmatic insomnia and an accompanying sense of the moment-by-moment fleetingness of life. "Dust to dust," she murmurs complacently and goes to sleep...
Only Bea's presence, a circle like the mouth of a while bell of which her overheard voice was the chiming clapper, promised repose. Hanema remembered her as a calm pool in which he could kneel to the depth of his navel...
Whose poetry is that? Piet Hanema doesn't have it in him, and Updike is supposed to be minding his own business in the background. In A Month of Sundays, Marshfield is the poet...
...content, Rabbit Redux resembles Updike's much-lambasted Couples, which told of Piet Hanema, a wealthier, more intelligent Angstrom type striving to build foundations against death in the sexually gymnastic but spiritually hollow "Tarbox, Mass." That's where politics made a hasty entrance into Updike's America; Tarbox couples coupled during Asian wars and American assassinations, forced to form their own secular groups partly by their total disengagement from those encroaching headlines. The major critical complaint was lodged against the novel's bulk; its themes and symbolic framework, were not filled out with sufficient flesh-and-blood drama...