Word: mother
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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...WERE A KID in suburbia, your parents fought about the furnace, your mother's weekly grocery allowance, the missing pair to dad's tennis socks. They got divorced, saw psychiatrists, remarried other people with whom they could continue to wrestle over footwear and the price of broccoli. Your life had problems...
Updike declines to extract and integrate into a morally significant vision his microscopic slide samples of suburban crises: divorce, guilt over divorce, guilt over not wanting a divorce, guilt over guilt. He focuses on the isolated nightmares with wrenching accuracy: the kid who phones his real father infront of Mother's new man because he instinctively knows it will hurt them and at the same time he knows they can't stop him Or the lone spouse who chain-smokes in "the blue light of midnight" while his unconscious wife snores contentedly beside him, unaware of his terrifying spiral into...
INSTEAD UPDIKE plunges us into a scrutiny of the alienated characters. In "Love Song for a Moog Synthesizer," for instance, he binds us in the "spirals of indignation" of a Cub Scout den mother. Throughout the collection of short stories, Updike stalks the problem of human disconnectedness from all imaginable angles, realistically fleshing it out in "Domestic Life in America," abstracting it in his geometric "Problems," sketching a symbolic outline in the opening piece, "Commercial," recasting it as classical tragedy in "Augustine's Concubine." But he refuses to hunt out the solutions in the diseased scenarios. His "maimed and fanatic...
...sunken continent," to which Updike appeals to show the unity between human individual islands is a tired thematic device. The frogman and the Cub Scout mother have very little to say to each other...
Instead, he sticks to the original as a toddler cleaves to its mother. When he ventures to emulate the style of another production, it is the oft-shown movies--itself remarkably faithful to the script. In the film version, hundreds of upper-crust stiffs assemble for the Ascot opening day races and stand at attention in overly starched collars without flexing a facial muscle...