Word: letters
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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...Roger's Version (1986), John Updike constructed a plot with some teasing but unacknowledged similarities to Nathaniel Hawthorne's The Scarlet Letter: an unfrocked New England minister named Roger broods over the infidelity of his wife. This time out, the author makes his indebtedness perfectly clear. S., Updike's 32nd book and 13th novel, opens with two quotations from The Scarlet Letter and with a heroine who is an unmistakable incarnation of Hester Prynne, the most famous adulteress in American literature. Sarah Worth (nee Price) boasts a Prynne among her ancestors and, like Hester, a daughter named Pearl. This mother...
...Hawthorne novels (Blithedale, Pyncheon) crop up in unexpected contexts; as Sarah seeks her karma in the Sunbelt, she has reason to resent "my old-fashioned Puritan conscience." But Updike's use of such references should not be taken too somberly; the stern, rock-ribbed moral universe of The Scarlet Letter serves here as a subtle counterpoint to a comic vision of anything-goes ethics in mid-1980s America...
...Spence's letter downplays the criticisms: "The group also identified what it found to be the defects of our virtues." Spence refused to comment further yesterday...
...Patrick J. Sullivan tried to sell several apartments in 1985. His attorney, Walsh, who began his freshman term on the City Council that year, told him that one of the apartments' tenants, Cynthia A. Cox, and her brother wanted to buy two of the units. But according to a letter from Walsh to Cox, these plans deteriorated to a point where a deal could not be made...
Turk submitted as evidence a letter from Walsh, which he said showed that the Coxes had planned to use two common ways of evading the rent control laws: separately buying units in order to rent them to each other, and buying property through a trust fund. According to the letter, Cynthia Cox had planned to live in the apartment that her brother bought, while her brother moved into hers. Each would then have paid rent to the other...