Word: pocock
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: all
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
...Vries' new hero needs more than fruit. Ted Peachum is a budding aesthete and furniture mover in Pocock, Ill. He is also a parody of that familiar species, the small-town boy with big ideas and an ambition to rise above his station. Who can blame him? His father rereads comic books and hibernates like a bear, his aunt is known chiefly for canceling subscriptions and returning unused portions, and his grandfather contracted a venereal disease at a health...
Anyone who talks like that in Pocock is bound to attract the attention of Mrs. d'Amboise, a sculptor "who like all women of quality chewed her gum with her front teeth and rarely popped it within earshot of people with known academic degrees or season subscription boxes to the Opera." At 16, Peachum becomes Mrs. d'Amboise's model and a suitable future suitor for her ten-year-old daughter Columbine...
...Columbine's "doorbells," he feels a pang of remorse that is followed immediately by a twinge of desire. Peachum's entanglements are due to varying intentions of various d'Amboises. There is, for instance, his lust for Vim d'Amboise's wife Kathy, a Pocock police officer. "But soft," as De Vries might say when the going gets muddy. His explanation is more involved than his predicament: "There was Mrs. d. wanting me to wait for Columbine, with Luke standing by ready to feed me some knuckle pie if I didn't do right...
...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...
...they held in inventory. The later profits from price boosts have gone primarily to the OPEC nationalizes of the oil. But the companies have done a creditable job of maintaining earnings through what amounts to an oil revolution, and for some the outlook is so bright as to make Pocock's optimism seem understated. Once they pass the point at which the rising returns from Alaska, the North Sea and the Gulf of Mexico outweigh the enormous sums they are still spending to expand there, the Sisters will probably confront an unusual new problem for the 1980s: coping with...