This New England

''Snow at Louveciennes'' (1874), by Alfred Sisley (1839-1899), painted before they worried about power outages in little French towns.

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John Updike, a longtime North Shore person, wrote brilliantly about New England, though without quite the lyrical beauty (and pain) of John Cheever or the social precision of the under-rated middle-brow writer John Marquand.

Updike's deepest longings were back in the little Pennsylvania town he came from, where his greatest creation lived in the Rabbit novels, about a guy who most manifestly did not go to Harvard.

As for Updike's other interests, they were so broad and enthusiastic, and his writing so felicitous, as to make him America's uber Man of Letters for decades. (He was a hell of a draftsman, too.)

His death shocked many. He was 76 but such was his seeming energy and even boyishness that many thought he'd go on to 95, like some famous old European novelist.

(I ran into him a few times in a drugstore in the town where he and my mother lived on the North Shore, and he seemed to possess a natural, quiet cheerfulness. New England is small -- the church my desperately post-God parents went to was in the film of
The Witches of Eastwick.)

It's rather hard to conceive of the Internet age producing anyone quite like John Updike. 76 isn't that old but his death made the great age of New York publishing, with blue-pencil editors and expense-account lunches, seem to be a century ago, rather than 40 years.

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And now yet another Connecticut mayor, this one Eddie Perez of Hartford, has been arrested for corruption!

What is it that makes a state with such spiffy suburbs and countryside countenance such bad city governments? And what happened to Hartford that such a once staid middle-class place (''The Insurance Capital of America'') became such a mess.

As a former Connecticut resident, I know some of the answers but throw out the question for general discussion.

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You know things are bad in Rhode Island when the the opening of a chain restaurant at the outstandingly underused Quonset Point elicits a press release. I wish the Inside Scoop (great name!) well as we wait for a real port to pay for more retail.

How many new stores and restaurants can we have if we don't create any new wealth?

 Tags  John Cheever John Marquand John Updike Quonset Point Rabbit

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