Word: suburbanity
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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...pond-water creatures attending a cocktail party. Thurber could do this sort of thing well. Updike can't; except for Bech, a Book, his humor rarely breaks loose from cleverness. For the rest, there is a series of short stories about one of Updike's condescended-to suburban couples, called (smugly) the Maples. The first is very good indeed. It concerns Dick Maple's wobbly, not very creditable reactions when his wife escapes their nest by joining the civil rights movement...
...Gene McCarthy kind of crowd. In fact, McCarthy himself made his one campaign appearance of 1970 at this particular party, mobbed as the hero of the new suburban politics. These were his people: clean, earnest, charming, socially sophisticated, with an almost psychological addiction to pure, but inevitably lost causes...
...Suburban liberals like these have a tendency to deal in platitudes like peace and justice, without ever confronting the fact that for most people, the real issue is something on a less lofty plane: personal survival. In remaining pure, they avoid recognition of the New Bedfords around them, where working class people both black and white confront the gut issues of life...
Cargill's semisecret operation is fairly typical of most big grain dealers. The company's headquarters, tucked away in a secluded suburban woodland, is a replica of a French chateau. From there, company officials supervise an empire that last year generated $3.2 billion in sales and $38 million in profits. Cargill has more than 12,000 employees in 350 offices, mammoth grain terminals and storage elevators around the world. To move its grain, the company owns one of the nation's largest fleets of towboats and river barges, and regularly rents a 115-car freight train...
With two other friends--Drew Ballinger, a bottling company president who represents everything good about suburban life (a moral and compassionate individualism), and Bobby Trippe, a salesman, who does just about the opposite--Medlock and Gentry take on their state's largest, toughest river in canoes. The Cahulawassee is about to be dammed up, made into Lake Cabula for the economic sake of marinas and retirement homes. Medlock wants to move as one with this unbridled piece of nature before its force is shattered...