Word: lusts
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Dates: during 1960-1969
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...Jewishness and the urban environment, may appear to have only specialized appeal, but Roth gives it a universality that reaches beyond ethnic boundaries. It is a coda of rage and savagely honest self-lashing reminiscent of the performances of the late Lenny Bruce. No detail is varnished, no lust or act nice-Nellied as Portnoy complains, clowns and laments in his desperate efforts to claw his way to sanity. The result is a spontaneous emotional release of enormous authenticity and power...
...love affair is allowed momentarily to flourish in the marshes of Tarbox, and its individuality is contrasted to the interchangeable lust of the others. This is Piet's love for Foxy Whitman, a lady for whom the author too seems to have had some love, for he has made her a luminous and appealing character. But this affair glows only briefly. And though Piet and Foxy do marry, they do so long after their love has died...
...biggest sinner for them all is Delilah, and her characterization makes the film truly bizarre. In the classic story of good man led astray, DeMille pays little attention to the seduced here, concentrating instead on Delilah's lust for Samson. From her first appearance, as the kid sister of Samson's beloved, she is obviously excited by Samson's body, and her reaction to his outwrestling a lion is explicitly sexual. DeMille tentatively suggests Delilah's role as emasculating bitch (at one point she turns Samson into a docile houseboy), but ultimately backs away from this idea...
...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...
This earnestness in the face of farce is of a piece with Updike's general reverence toward sex. His contemporaries invade the ground with wild Dionysian yelps, mocking both the taboos that would make it forbidden and the lust that drives men to it. Updike can be honest about it, and his descriptions of the sight, taste and texture of women's bodies can be perfect little madrigals...