Word: pocock
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Dates: during 1980-1989
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Crack a Peter De Vries novel at random and you are likely to find a Midwesterner trying just a little too hard to keep from making a fool of himself among the sophisticates of the Northeast. The journey from Pocock, Ill., to Decency, Conn., has been played forward, backward and sideways, sometimes strictly for laughs and often, as in The Blood of the Lamb, to illustrate that comedy is not the opposite of tragedy but its Siamese twin...
...midshipmen were sunk almost before the race began. They rowed to the starting line in a heavy, wooden Pocock shell better suited for the perpetually rough Severn River in Annapolis. But the Charles early Saturday morning was glass-smooth, and the Crimson oarsmen grabbed an early five-seat lead at the start, rowing at a sharp 42-stroke cadence...
...second freshman boat and the third varsity won in earlier races--everything that could have gone wrong did," MacMillan said. "We warmed up, and then had to wait over an hour before facing; our lighter fiberglass Schoenbrod shells were not as sturdy in the weather as the heavier, wooden Pocock shells Navy raced in. The waves were even higher than the gunwhales--what...
...satiric edge of the author's seriocomedies, The Blood of the Lamb and Reuben, Reuben. In Decency, Conn., a favorite De Vries setting, the commuters and their wives clown around on the wall-to-wall carpeting but hear the steady drumming of eternity on the roof. In Pocock pipes of Pan playing tunes of innocence drown out the ravings of a street-corner Jeremiah. With sin and guilt suspended, the book lacks the touch of tragic relief that has made De Vries a top banana of the Calvinist comedy hour...
...whores of Pocock, mothers of abomination, housewives wallowing in your adulteries, the Lord will smite you. Lolling in your tubs scented with bath oils, in houses equipped with burglar and fire alarms. But what are ye safe from while imperiling your own souls? For he who said he would come as a thief in the night will do even so, and all your alarms will avail you naught in that hour when ye shall see him face to face . . . For in that dread day you shall get the message. Without CB . . . it shall be, that's it, buddy...