Word: piet
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Dates: during 1960-1969
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...married to whom. In adultery the tenuous meaning we create by marriage is destroyed, and one human is the same as any other. Eros is no respector of persons. Sexuality is a force as indifferent as electricity to the copper wire of our bodies. Women are, as Piet Hanema, the main character says, "vessels to be filled...
Love in Tarbox is not a free and unmerited human grace, but a mask of fear. Love-making is for Piet a way of momentarily escaping his haunting fear of death, a way of forgetting the reality of loss, the eventual extinction of consciousness...
...comedy. He dares to hope for both the reality of God and the sanity of society, and he sees sex not as a target but as a sanctuary. Scenes that other writers would play as burlesque, Updike plays straight, no matter how absurd they are. In Couples, for example, Piet and Foxy have huddled in an upstairs bathroom during the Kennedy night party. Her breasts are milk-laden after the birth of her baby. "Nurse me!," begs Piet. Foxy consents, but moments later, Angela knocks at the door In panic, Piet leaps out of the window to the ground...
Above and behind his reverence which extends to oral encounters between Piet and Foxy-looms Updike's central metaphor. He finds in sex an expression of his own Piet-like quest to recapture the past. Nostalgia suffuses him, goads him, at times frightens him. At home, in Ipswich, Mass., Updike spends hours leafing through boyhood photograph albums. "I find old photographs powerful," he says. "There's a funny thing about the way the flux of time was halted at this particular spot. You just can't get back...
...Scandal. During the past few years, Ipswich has at last been taking over from Shillington as the prod to Updike's imagination, and his short stories have abandoned their boyhood themes and begun to examine the years of his maturity. Like Piet Hanema struggling to accept his God, Updike has suffered doubts...