Word: tarbox
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...twines. Along the edge of the mothering sea stand colonial cottages reaped from the wasted fields of the American Revolution and threshed into 20th century quaintness. Church steeples point for all to see toward the virtuous life. Railroad tracks dwindle northward toward Boston, an unconcerned hour away. This is Tarbox, Mass., the setting of John Updike's new novel Couples, where primitive American democracy reveals itself in town meetings, and three streets of the business district are named Hope, Charity and Divinity...
...many such communities, the good citizens of Tarbox accept health, wealth and wisdom as natural perquisites of their membership in the American middle class. Tarbox is a fun place too. Almost any Sunday, one can find a bunch of the fellows tossing around a basketball in somebody's driveway, while the women chat and watch and the children scramble and squabble. There's likely to be a spirited game of tennis at John and Bernadette Ong's place, followed by a few tall, cold vodka-and-tonics perhaps at Matt and Terry Gallagher's. The women...
...community sex. Their Puritan gods have retreated to unawesome, half-deserted churches, where beaten clergymen, sizing up the businessman congregations, croak about an improbable Christ who "offers us present security, four-and-a-half percent compounded every quarter." The Biblical woman accused of adultery would be safe in Tarbox; here no stones are thrown, only envious glances. With no heat left in the Protestant American crucible, the comfortable couples of Tarbox have reached out for another kind of warmth. Updike is forthright about his purpose. "There's a lot of dry talk around about love and sex being somehow...
Clearly, Couples was not drawn entirely from his imagination. Tarbox, says Updike, is purely fictional, "with only a touch of the Ipswich marshes peeking through." Still, it is worth
GEORGE E. TARBOX...