Word: suburbias
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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ALFRED KAZIN GAVE Updike "an A-plus" for his last novel, calling him "a sociologist of all this new American territory." Updike deserved it--as a chronicler of suburbia he is unsurpassed. But a sociologist is something different from a novelist. He is an onlooker--in Updike's case, a perceptive and entertaining one--and he watches from a safe distance. The artist who stands removed from the scene and the people he describes risks losing a gut sensibility that a sociologist, after...
...cent of the electorate is black, though 40 per cent of the school children are from minority groups. But the NSCAR never takes an official stand on the validity of the concept of the School Committee. Their efforts are directed more towards middle-class whites already segregated in suburbia, and students isolated on campuses, than towards the black inner-city community...
...stock character from Updike's central casting. He snorts at liberal Protestantism and pumps for devotion inspired by awe and terror ("Mop up spilt religion! Let us have it in its original stony jars or not at all!"). At the same time he pushes graphic, adulterous sex as suburbia's best anodyne; coupling is sweetest with the ashen taste of sin. He sees women chiefly as attractive hurdles in the heavenly sweepstakes, where all the runners are male...
...leavings, these people helped to nourish the roots of racism, even though they discriminated only in the most genteel ways--much like Harvard today, with its fashionably mild distaste for the Afro-American Studies Department and its yearly production of a crop of youth to fill the houses of suburbia. If Saturday's student marchers end up as part of that crop of youth, the march--though it will still have an immediate impact, and still be important--will also deserve all the labels its opponents will undoubtedly pin on it anyway...
This play walks a zigzag line between comedy and farce and often manages to be staggeringly funny. Alan Ayckbourn, a sly chronicler of British suburbia, gets three couples together on successive Christmas Eves in their respective kitchens and wreaks droll havoc on their status and character...