Word: tarbox
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...Updike may have found in the hedonistic couples of Tarbox the explosive expression of his theme that his work has always lacked...
...very nearly have. Half from choice, half from unspoken fear, the couples herd together like sheep in a storm. During the time of the novel-mid-1963 to mid-1964-the life of the town reaches into them only in minor ways, and the life of the world beyond Tarbox is noted by the author rather than the characters (as upper-middle-class people did in those days, they joke about White House philandering...
...couples of Tarbox live in a place and time that together seem to have been ordained for this quest...
...Ritual. Freddy's dirty truths and Piet's butterfly adulteries converge with the arrival in Tarbox of Foxy Whitman and her husband Ken, a biochemist preoccupied with his own second-rateness. Alone of the women, Foxy seems unafraid of what Freddy calls "the smell and hurt of love"; seven years of childless boredom with Ken have made her vulnerable. Now, though she is pregnant, she and Piet Hanema fall in love, an old-fashioned and banal assertion of life that brings down on them and the tribe the old-fashioned and banal tribulations of middle-class guilt, entrapment...
...warm encirclement of Tarbox, friends, and family...