Word: tarbox
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Shot Put--1. Brian Tarbox, Northeastern...
...loudly; and the daughter's infant child, who is hopelessly deformed yet somehow survives. The action starts with the family's kidnaping of the baby from a hospital; it ends, after a cross-continental trek, at a revivalist religious meeting in Moose Jaw, Sask., where the infant, Jesus O. Tarbox, is to be put forward as a new Messiah. The play is performed at fever pitch by its authors, Levi Lee, Larry Larson and Rebecca Alworth, and their dual roles have made them a little undisciplined: they have tended to retain anything that gets a laugh or a gasp...
...Tarbox. The place is called Greenwood this time. And John Updike presents no magic circle of friends to be destroyed by adultery and the blight of gratified desire as he did in Couples. All that the author seems to have up his sleeve is a couple of pairs, one of your everyday unbalanced domestic quadrangles, in fact. Jerry loves Sally Mathias-and Ruth Conant, but is married only to Ruth. Sally loves herself and Jerry-but is married to Richard Mathias. Richard, who sees himself as "a teacher of worldliness," once had a brief, slick affair with Ruth...
...superb. The more striking of these, called The Millies, is the best piece of short fiction in some time. Updike has captured the hostility between culture and counterculture in the U.S., complete and entire, in about eight pages. He tells of an unbuilt, rocky hill in the center of Tarbox, his fictional Massachusetts town. There the young of the town begin roosting in a large untidy flock. They do very little; smoke some pot, drink a little beer, look down silently and passively on the activity of Main Street. The passivity, the looking-down, the doing-very-little first alarm...
...content, Rabbit Redux resembles Updike's much-lambasted Couples, which told of Piet Hanema, a wealthier, more intelligent Angstrom type striving to build foundations against death in the sexually gymnastic but spiritually hollow "Tarbox, Mass." That's where politics made a hasty entrance into Updike's America; Tarbox couples coupled during Asian wars and American assassinations, forced to form their own secular groups partly by their total disengagement from those encroaching headlines. The major critical complaint was lodged against the novel's bulk; its themes and symbolic framework, were not filled out with sufficient flesh-and-blood drama...