Word: piet
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Dates: during 1960-1969
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...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...
...left with the impression that most human feelings are absent in Tarbox. Though Piet has a momentary infusion of paternal love, it seems like no more than a nod to that feeling on the part of the author, a reflex in his own character. Piet eventually leaves his two young children without any deeply anguishing regrets. Children in Tarbox are mainly encumbrances to their parents. They are bundled up and transported, even when sick and feverish, so that the couples may continue their adulterous visits. It is the children who finally give an air of pathos to the network...
...actual life of the book seems to me not in its thesis about the withdrawal of God, but in its repulsive vision of the absence of love and grace from human relations. Unfortunately the thesis seems to crush the book's main character, to drain the life from him. Piet is, supposedly, the scapegoat of the couples. And it is the group's judgment that Piet was used by Foxy in order to discard her cold-fish husband. But to see him as a scapegoat is to accept him as will less--and so the author seems to have viewed...
...Piet is unable to refuse an encounter. At the end of the book he has been drained of all sense of choice, of free action. His will has been sacrificed to the author's formulation. It is perhaps this sense of authorial intrusion that is the novel's main flaw, that accounts for its lack of expansiveness, its lack of extended meanings, its lack of resonance...
...times the sea was steely purple, stained; at others, under a close warm rain sky, the no-color of dirty wash; choppy rows hurried in from the horizon to be delivered and disposed of in the lick and slide at the shore. Piet stopped to pick up angel wings, razor clam shells, sand dollars with their infallibly etched star and their considerate airhole for an inhabiting creature Piet could not picture...