I’m honestly a bit surprised that I picked this up. To my prejudices it was the jejune, possibly self-caricatural big bestseller, the book whose fame caused every obituary writer to narrowly cast Updike as a chronicler of upper-middle class New England marriages (Rabbit is a Pennsylvanian petit-bourgeois, as it happens). I had heard plenty of bad reports—-from personal friends, from distantly eminent judges (Martin Amis called it a “false summit” of the Updike oeuvre). But I was at a library sale, and it was $2, and the jacket photo was so vintage Updike, with his quizzical smirk, seersucker shirt tucked into chinos, tanned forearms, and behind him a wall of weathered Nantuckety beach house shingle. And at that sale a few weeks previous I had bought a copy The Stories of John Cheever, and had read so many that I wanted more midcentury New England agnst, more communter trains and cocktail shakers and girdles, and the sale also had stacks of old early 1960s issues of LIFE that nobody bought but contained the ads of that world, ads for cheap vernacular bourbon and Hi-Fi and convertibles that you drive a blond to the beach in. So I had to buy Couples. How bad could it be? Updike long ago entered my personal pantheon of writers (James, Nabokov, Edmund White) whose least distinguished books are readable, so great is my relish of their phrasing and perception. I wasn’t expecting much but I thought it would be fun. Turns out, this is the true trial of an Updike-lover. I passed, and was rewarded; but much in this book is bad. For one, there are too many people. 10 couples, 20 rather boring and/or repellent characters entangled with each other in adulterous affairs past, ongoing, and just dawning. Piet Hanema, like Updike a Dutch-descended sensualist Christian, churchgoing but priapic, serves as a sturdy enough platform for Updike’s observatory lyricism (well, except for the painfully derivative Joycean stream-of-consciousness); and Piet’s wife and daughters are finely drawn; but the rest of these people just suck. So much dialogue! The vast middle of the novel is devoted to seemingly endless transcripts of middlebrow cocktail party ruminations; to feeble flirty jokes, soporific gossip, booze-addled attempts to apply half-remembered Freudian and anthropological terms to their ennui. Updike was asleep at the wheel for much this one. He does the tense socializing of outwardly friendly but lustful and rivalrous couples so much better in Rabbit Is Rich, in the country club scenes, where the number of couples is manageably fewer and they are all interesting, or at least relevant to Rabbit’s story. Updike also indulges some wannabe-comic but totally unfunny racial characterization. John Ong, a Korean, is allowed one trait: unintelligible English. And Ben Saltz, a Jew, is ponderous and pushy; he also reads Commentary. There is also excruciatingly metaphorical sex. Less than you’d expect in a 400+ page novel about suburban swingers, but still quite a bit. Piet and the very pregnant Foxy Whitman have astronomical sex: Their lovemaking lunar, revolving frictionless around the planet of her womb. The crescent bits of ass his tongue could touch below her cunt’s petals. Her far-off cries, eclipsed. As I neared the last of the novel’s four mega-chapters, I began to think that writing this ridiculous could have been avoided if Piet, as much I favored him above the others, hadn’t been the surrogate intelligence of the book. His wide-eyed wonder at the world was unsuited to a catalogue of bored bed-hopping—-to make such action interesting Updike needed command of a Gallic, cynical tone; this should have been a novel of malicious manners, modeled on the novel of pitilessly dissected motives that is, said W.M. Spackman, one of the glories of French literature--Les Liaisons dangereuses, Madame Bovary. But as I said, these were my thoughts before starting the last section, which turned out to be uninterruptedly awesome, an 80-page clean sprint of wisdom and insight and skill. Updike even redeems his condescending characterization of John Ong with the moving scene in Ong’s hospice room. The chatty extraneous couples recede and it becomes all about Piet’s disintegrating marriage, his apartmented singleness, his reunion with Foxy. The tone is far-seeing, laconic, epilogic. Updike drops on you the crushing sadness of just starting to move on--and not just from a failed relationship, but from friendship, from mere acquaintance (“what have they forgotten, what have they lost?” asks the narrator’s first wife in Cheever’s “The Seaside Houses,” like Couples a story about sundering and new selves and lost time set against a backdrop of New England beaches). Suddenly, Updike’s melancholic attention, throughout the book, to the mutations and minute light effects of seasonal change came to have a thematic resonance; I remembered that the action takes place over just a year, a blip in the lives of people. Opening to my marker last night, I steeled myself for a weary slog to the end; I closed the novel with a big smile and my brain buzzing. That’s what I read Updike for.
The view from 2014 makes 1963 seem impossibly far away. Cultural barriers and attitudes that existed in that cold-war, post-WWII era seem quaint, even contrived, seen through the lens of ensuing decades. We tend to scoff at depictions of a decadent suburbia (or, in this case, exurbia) fraught with philandering husbands, coffee klatch rendezvous, and ski lodge assignations, but we forget this was an America finding itself after the horrors of two world wars with the help of Freud and the pill. These days reliable birth control and anti-depressants are ubiquitous, but in 1963 the pill was a miracle and analysis was a religion. Take away the fear (and results) of pregnancy and woman became liberated, equal to their male partners. Unfortunately, analysis often produced more mixed results. Now it was okay for women to openly enjoy sex but it added new pressures and expectations. A woman who didn't climax every time or who didn't want sex as much as a man was frigid. Updike uses all of this, with the addition of changing religious views, as the stage for "Couples". While Updike's descriptions of women's bodies can be a little off-putting (once again his women reminded me of R. Crumb's women), it is clear he worships the female body in all of it's many shapes and sizes and he shows a surprising level of sensitivity in this fluid and flank filled book. There's also a pervasive sadness throughout the novel, enhanced by the New England, salt marsh setting. The actual couples are sad, selfish, and bored. They play games and drink, ignoring both their children and the world. They think they are better, different, more enlightened, than those couples who came before, but ultimately they are doomed to the same middle-class, middle age morass and are replaced by even younger, more enlightened couples.A good contemporary review of the book can be found at http://www.nytimes.com/1968/04/07/boo...
What do You think about Couples (1996)?
Sixties somethingsThe early nineteen sixties beckoned on a decade of change. Not only did the world shake off most of the remnants of its most recent global war, not only did Europe’s defeated former colonial powers almost complete their American-dictated divestment of their assets, not only did capitalism institutionalise the shape of globalised future, but also, apparently, married people discovered sex. But not, for the purposes of Couples by John Updike, with their legal partners…John Updike published Couples in 1968, so as the decade went, the novel was already something of a retrospective, a conscious revisiting of years of change. John F Kennedy was shot. Cuban missiles suffered their crises. There was probably the occasional sporting event. Wars turned cold. Vietnam was still just a country. Much of contemporary life, however, seemed to by-pass Tarbox, a New England residential area in the academic commuter belt. Methods of contraception in many ways dominated life in the chessboard of this community, where moves made in private produced their perhaps inevitable physical responses alongside personal and social consequences, both intended and not.Couples looks at the lives of several Tarbox types. Each relationship has its own foibles. Each one has its man who is doing his best to be a man, and each has its woman who aspires to her own brand of perfection. Eventually the story focuses on one particular relationship, that of Piet and Foxy, pursued despite their mutual marital partners.As ever with John Updike, the sex is both voluminous and throbbing. Each encounter seems to rediscover that thrill of first touch, the transport of discovery. But also guilt begins to build its walls of deception as the habit sets. There are consequences, not only for partners, but also for children and even community. And, in an age when conception can be avoided, both bio-chemically and mechanically, there can still be other consequences that can prove to be even more far-reaching, and provoke visits to the dentist.The couples in Couples begin their communal voyage of discovery believing, perhaps like Columbus at the behest of Spanish monarchs, themselves a couple, that the world was about to begin anew, especially and just fort them. Also for them, as for Columbus, the journey was to prove a long one despite the fact that, certainly in twenty-first century terms, it does not go very far. For men and women conjoined, however, it’s about as far as it ever gets, and further than many might venture. When a long way from the comforts of home, many of us might feel the touch of insecurity. And so it is for Tarbox people for whom, embarking upon their voyages of self-discovery outside their homely security, initial wonder at novelty soon engenders new doubt. Late on, John Updike notes that “We are all exiles who need to bathe in the irrational”. We know it’s not going to do us any good, but still we indulge. The compulsion is complete, perhaps inevitable, and thus the reminder that once through life is all we have is duly delivered, but much later, of course, that we really need to hear it. It has passed by before we have noticed.Like all voyages of discovery, John Updike’s Couples is a dated experience and a long one at that. But like all dated material, if it faithfully reflects and truly inhabits its own time, its journey is still worth the effort, its results permanently revelatory. The respectable normality that John Updike eventually imposes on his straying sheep reminds us that though new knowledge changes assumptions and new gadgets might render a different sheen onto the surface of life, we are still very much on the same voyage, whatever the age.
—Philip
Couples is about various married people clandestinely swapping partners. Updike has always been sex obsessed. Well I guess we all are, but this is just a dirty book. Don’t get me wrong, I have read a number of books written by “Anonymous,” which also had convenient and educational photos (at least to an 11-year-old) contained therein. But this book is dirty in that the fornicators are not good but flawed people; they are from my perspective, amoral.There is a huge difference between people who cheat who are in bad marriages and what occurs in this book. As I can tell the marriages are fine, though not perfect, however these self-indulgent people cavalierly copulate about the neighborhood.This is not The Scarlett Letter – a book about adultery in which a good woman cheats on a cold man and eventually uses her “sin” to become an even better person – this is just unsympathetic characters huddled in dark corners….so since I did not care if all the characters dropped dead, I am not recommending this book.
—John Harder
My first experience with Updike was troubling to say the least. His tale of a group of couples in late 60's suburbia is full of the most unlikeable, misguided and uninteresting characters I've encountered in some time, with a premise that is at least daring and probably highly topical for its time. But as the plot moves forward and the characters jump around from bed to bed and partner to partner, it feels like Updike is writing sex scenes with the maniacal glee of a high school boy, and he writes several pages long stream of consciousness passages in the hopes that we may think its deep and profound literature. It leaps around tonally as well, placing the characters in some outlandish and highly comical situations followed by more tragic ones, such as having a character succumb to a horrible illness. It's than kind of laughable when you notice that its a scientist whose accent makes it impossible for him to COMMUNICATE with the other characters. The heavy nudges of "this is symbolic" or "this is important" is piled on so heavily in parts that analysis is almost unnecessary. For its time the story and its somewhat graphic sex scene were most likely highly topical, but, as some consider this a major work of the large Updike canon, I may not be investing the time into the Rabbit novels anything soon. Some nice prose here and there but on the whole the novel is kind of a slog.
—Eric
