Word: novelized
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Dates: during 1960-1969
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They very nearly have. Half from choice, half from unspoken fear, the couples herd together like sheep in a storm. During the time of the novel-mid-1963 to mid-1964-the life of the town reaches into them only in minor ways, and the life of the world beyond Tarbox is noted by the author rather than the characters (as upper-middle-class people did in those days, they joke about White House philandering...
Lyrical is not the final word for the desperate tribal rites that come to consume the lives of the couples. At the novel's outset they are merely a gang of friends who, like so many smalltown sets, see rather too much of one another. They gather for endless whisky-driven parties by night, spend their weekends playing games. They gossip in the faintly malicious, secretly thrilled saxophone tones of bourgeois life...
...characters apart or to remember who is sleeping with whom except by drawing a chart. (The generous explanation is that this is not due to the author's lack of craftsmanship, but rather that it represents a deliberate attempt to show the dreary interchangeability of the adulterers.) The novel is seen largely through Piet's intelligence and sensibilities. Most of the other male characters are unreal, merely equipped with identifying jobs and stigmata. Updike paints Foxy and Angela full-length and achieves an equal effect in far fewer brush strokes with Marcia and Janet, two of the husband...
...somewhere between caterwauling and glossolalia. But prose style is one of the minor differences between Updike and his contemporaries. The larger fact is that however valid his own objectives and achievements, he has ignored the mainstream of contemporary Western fiction. The French, in the roman nouveau, have reduced the novel to a random series of received sounds and images; the English are tearing apart seven centuries of established order...
Updike's novels, though very much distinct from each other, were each rooted in the past. The Poorhouse Fair, though ostensibly set in New Jersey, was really drawn from the old folks' home near the Updike house in Shillington, and told a slight, whispered story of the accumulating sense of pointlessness among the inmates. From there, Updike leaped two generations to Rabbit, Run, a quietly savage novel about a former high school basketball star who simply runs away from wife, child, job and the suffocating box of senseless moral obligations. It was a flawlessly turned portrait...