Books--Fiction

Couples: John Updike in 1968

A recent article in the New York Times Book Review about American male novelists and their fictional portrayals (or avoidance of portrayals) of sex had me returning to John Updike’s Couples.  (The NYTBR essay is by Katie Roiphe, and you can read it here: http://bit.ly/92OgMV)

A 1968 shocker

Born in 1932, John Updike died in January 2009.  By 1968, he had already gained a reputation as l’enfant terrible of American letters, on the strength of his first four novels, which included Rabbit, Run (1960) and The Centaur (1963).  But Couples was — like a lot of other things that happened in 1968– a real shocker.  It is filled with exceedingly graphic sex scenes, but since it’s Updike, the scenes are richly drawn, complicated, on a sentence level dazzling and satisfying, though ultimately kind of wearying, too.

What becomes of the “greatest generation”?

The novel is set in the village of Tarbox, outside Boston, during the years of the tragically brief Kennedy administration. There is so much detail about politics and current events at the endless cocktail parties you can almost date the chapters precisely:  the USS Thresher disaster; the death of the newborn Kennedy baby; and a lengthy, boozy, and irreverent party on the night of the JFK assassination.  The plot, such as it is, revolves around a set of 6 or 8 (I lost track) married couples– most of them in their 30s,  making them the tail end of the “greatest generation.”  Some of the men are World War II veterans; most of them are college-educated (including the women); and some of the men commute into Boston or Cambridge for work.  There are children, of course, but the adults don’t seem all that interested in them.

“A black mass of community sex.”

The milieu of Tarbox (widely assumed to be Updike’s Ipswich MA by another name) is not quite suburban, not exactly Revolutionary Road or The Man in the Gray Flannel Suit territory, but close, very close.    Television’s Mad Men comes to mind, though Updike has almost no interest in the work life of men and much more interest in fornication.  The title could well be “Coupling,” given the novel’s virtually un-mappable network of marital infidelities, all of them within the tight confines of “the group” of couples.  The affairs are supposedly clandestine, but it’s clear that “everyone” knows about everybody else’s business in this fishbowl.  As TIME magazine’s editors put it:   “The fact is that beneath this suburban idyl, Updike’s couples are caught up in a black mass of community sex.”

Couples– and the sensation it caused–landed Updike on the cover of TIME on April 26, 1968.  (Updike’s second TIME cover came in October 1982, after his third “Rabbit” novel, Rabbit is Rich, received the Pulitzer Prize.) The extent, the casualness, and the voraciousness of the dalliances truly astonished American readers–and, in fact, I was also more than a little incredulous.  ”This is my parents’ generation,” I thought to myself:  ”Was this really going on?”  (Probably not, I assumed: the class/religious differences probably meant that my parents’ circle of couples–Catholic, working-class, “traditional”–was more chaste.  But . . . doubts linger.)

Tarbox and the material world

There is such a wealth of period detail in Couples!  It’s as if Updike had set himself the task of delineating a precise place and time– the minutiae of household decor, of dress and hairstyles, of music (the couples play records and dance in their living rooms at parties).  The couples engage in tedious, often inebriated chit-chat about “the world” outside their world, which could mean the next suburb over, or another hemisphere away.  There is talk of the space race, the Cold War, and the barely audible sounds of conflict coming from Vietnam.  And then there is “the Pill,” which–they all acknowledge–has given “everyone” so much freedom to play around.

The novel’s timeline edges just into 1964, and thus misses the upheavals and notorious events of 1968.  Still, Couples still provides a remarkable “picture window” into the affluence, cynicism, and complacencies of the entire postwar era.

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