Word: piet
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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...
...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...