Word: hanema
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...married to whom. In adultery the tenuous meaning we create by marriage is destroyed, and one human is the same as any other. Eros is no respector of persons. Sexuality is a force as indifferent as electricity to the copper wire of our bodies. Women are, as Piet Hanema, the main character says, "vessels to be filled...
...dentist by trade, but in fact he is a faithless St. Augustine indulging his "hyena appetite for dirty truths" in his role as Updike's designated "priest" to the tribe. "He thinks we're a magic circle of heads to keep the night out," says Angela Hanema. "He thinks we've made a church of one another...
...Whitman and her husband Ken, a biochemist preoccupied with his own second-rateness. Alone of the women, Foxy seems unafraid of what Freddy calls "the smell and hurt of love"; seven years of childless boredom with Ken have made her vulnerable. Now, though she is pregnant, she and Piet Hanema fall in love, an old-fashioned and banal assertion of life that brings down on them and the tribe the old-fashioned and banal tribulations of middle-class guilt, entrapment and helplessness...
...Piet Hanema alone, the chase into neighborly beds comes close to the course of tragedy. Unlike the others he is hounded not only by lust, curiosity and boredom but by a terrible sense of time fleeing. He is haunted by the past by shepherds paralyzed in webs of lead his boyhood Dutch Reformed Church, by his father's rough hands tending the fragile flowers in his greenhouse, most of all by his parents' death in an automobile accident. ("Piet pictured shattered glass strewn across the road...
...Scandal. During the past few years, Ipswich has at last been taking over from Shillington as the prod to Updike's imagination, and his short stories have abandoned their boyhood themes and begun to examine the years of his maturity. Like Piet Hanema struggling to accept his God, Updike has suffered doubts...