Word: womanizers
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Dates: during 1960-1969
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...couples are caught up in a black mass of 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...
...been fierce at times for John and Mary Updike. She is a strong, self-contained woman with the "firm ankles" of Updike heroines, and many of their friends believe that he could not survive without her. Do Updike's many stories of tension in marriage suggest experiences of his own? Says he: "My marriage, like many others, has had its intervals of deaths and renewals...
...panic, they turn to Freddy Thorne for help in finding an abortionist. There follows a rather absurd turn of plot that seems straight out of 19th century melodrama. All but twirling his mustachios, Freddy agrees-in return for a night alone with Piet's wife Angela, the one woman in the tribe who has never entered the communal bed. Implausibly, Angela consents. One night in a ski lodge, after the Thornes and the Hanemas have had too much to drink, Angela suddenly says, "Well, is this the night?" Georgene Thorne, helpless, furious, goes to her room. Angela busses Piet...
Updike has found a tantalizing metaphor for this quest in the legend of Iseult-the unattainable woman who vanishes at the instant she is possessed. "What is it that shines from Iseult's face but our own past, with its strange innocence and its strange need to be redeemed?" he wrote in an essay in 1963 What is nostalgia but love for that part of ourselves which is in Heaven forever removed from change and corruption? A woman, loved, momentarily eases the pain of time by localizing nostalgia: the vague and irrecoverable objects of nostalgic longing are assimilated, under...
...unreal, merely equipped with identifying jobs and stigmata. Updike paints Foxy and Angela full-length and achieves an equal effect in far fewer brush strokes with Marcia and Janet, two of the husband swappers. The trouble is that with some minor differences, he seems to have used the same woman as model for them all-a well-meaning, even-temped, sexually adept American frau with not a bitch or a shrew, a man-hater or child-worshiper in the crowd...