Word: wife
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: during 1970-1979
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
Surviving Knowles are his wife, mother, brother, two daughters and four sons, one of whom, John Jr., is a senior at Harvard...
...father, offering Dubin a perfect opening to finally unburden himself about his love for Fanny Bick, he lets the opportunity pass. Instead he delivers a tired, paternal lecture, retreating into the mythical wisdom he supposedly possesses as a biographer intimate with the lives of the great. Even when his wife discovers his affair with Fanny and the lame excuse of "protecting" her is gone, he still hasn't the nerve to give up his comfortable prison...
Other dichotomies haunt Dubin's life. He is Jewish; his wife is a WASP. He is a city boy transplanted to the country, middle-aged and in love with youth, an orderly soul fighting chaos. The novel is one long standoff between these competing forces, and in the end there is no resolution...
...BEGINS HOPEFULLY, the bare, carefully-crafted prose interspersed with a Yiddish irony that lightens its mood. Dubin's wife Kitty has a compulsion to smell the gas burners on the stove to make sure they are not leaking. Once she leaves the house without performing the ritual: "Kitty hastily reentered the house, hurried into the kitchen, fighting herself. Herself...
...lives with the message, "I can change, I want to change, all I need is for you to believe in me, love me and I will change." And it ends with Dubin sneaking out the back door to Fanny and, never spending the night, sneaking back to his broken wife before dawn. Do we care...