Word: suburbias
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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...leaves behind millions of adoring fans--the current undergraduate population is the youngest to have munched at the feedbag of homespun lessons about life and laughter from Ed's wry rerun commentary. Who can forget Mr. Ed driving a milk truck down the streets of suburbia? Will the image of Mr. Ed at shortstop ever fade? And will the very name "Wilbur" ever be the same? For Ed's rolling cadences turned that pedestrian monicker into a symbol for everyman, a stable influence in a changing world...
John Updike, happily, has gotten out in time. For 20 years Updike and his mellifluous prose have wandered through suburbia, exploring the desiccated guilt and lust of the well-off with a familiar eye. Updike, to be sure, became master of the art, rivalled only by John Cheever, but his recent novels had lost their fire--less compelling, almost tedious, they droned on, as if to say You have read my life so many times before, what more can I say? The painful autobiographical power of Couples petered out to a sense of dry boredom in A Month of Sundays...
...lined with shaded walkways, they were gleaming oases of retail chic among the growing, monotonous tracts of ranches and split-levels that spread out from the nation's cities after World War II. Now, more than a generation after the first sprawling shopping centers began sprouting up in suburbia, these great concrete meccas of merchandising are coming under increasing attack...
...syndicated newspaper humor columnist, Bombeck has evolved into a TV personality of the most plastic sort. She delivers her one-liners in a strident vibrato; she luxuriates in canned laughter as though it were the praise of a Nobel Prize jury. Bombeck used to satirize the vulgarity of American suburbia; now she epitomizes...
...Stories of John Cheever is that the stories are almost always better than people remember. Never before has it been possible to see so much of his short work so steadily and so whole. Never before has the received notion of a "typical" Cheever story-a satire on suburbia, based on fading Protestant morality -seemed further from the more complex and entertaining truth. This massive retrospective of 61 stories (selected by Cheever) is not only splendid from beginning to end paper; it charts one of the most important bodies of work in contemporary letters...