Customer Reviews

Couples

5 star:		(11)
4 star:		(13)
3 star:		(4)
2 star:		(2)
1 star:		(3)

 

 

Set in fictional Tarbox, MA in the early 1960's, this book of 1968 was certainly a risqu' and revealing look at marriage in a small suburban community at a time of increasing sexual awareness and openness. Looking back, the sexual content is actually rather mild, but, more importantly, it seems that the type of communities and lifestyles that Updike describe have been swallowed up by vast, numbing suburbs, where traffic is terrible, wives work, and neighbors are strangers.

Yet, the book is a keen look at the dissatisfactions of marriage. Most of the couples knew or suspected that unfaithfulness was occurring among themselves, but they seemed to understand, if only subconsciously, that infidelity was or could be an outlet for the limitations of a spouse. The central character is home remodeler Piet Hanema, married to the sublime, but unapproachable, Angela, who seems to be happiest when in the arms of his latest lover. Updike's entry into this world is at the point when the Whitman's move in: he a professor and Elizabeth, or Foxy, a tall, winsome beauty who is also pregnant. Their old home on the coast requires extensive renovation providing the opportunity for Piet and Foxy to start a complicated relationship that that has community-wide consequences.

The book is a challenging read containing Updike's typical complex descriptions of various scenes, etc. And the interactions of the various couples, usually at some sort of party, while revealing and sometimes insightful, do get tedious. The author hardly advocates this sort of group infidelity. In fact, there is a pervading sense of sadness about the book as many of the couples go their own way, their problems resolved or not. It is a simplification to label this book as one primarily about "wife swapping." For one, that is wrong, and secondly it is about people trying to find some happiness or connectedness in their lives.

Updike's portrait of the upper middle class in a sleepy Boston suburb in 1963 when people actually had more time than they knew what to do with seems almost as distant and foreign to our overworked present as Fitzgerald's Jazz Age. Set on the eve of the sexual revolution, the novel explores a circle of couples who nearly devour each other out of jealousy, lust and boredom. Yet, the book is not without its tender sides, as Updike manages some hard-won sympathy for his protagonist Piet Hanema, the philandering grown boy of a man who does very bad things for very sad reasons. Richly-detailed with references of the time, COUPLES is a vivid snapshot of America, or at least one slice of it, in 1963.

Having read many of Updike's books (he's my fav. author), I rate Couples in the middle. The book is full of subtle symbolism and not-so-subtle symbolism, and has the Updike trademark of colorful imagery. It is a fair treatment of the complexities of infidelity.

However, I found reading it a bit of a chore. If you want to read Updike, this one should not be your first. I'd recommend the second Rabbit book, Rabbit Redux.

I don't think anyone reads John Updike books to feel good about themselves, unless they want to feel glad that they are not the people in his novels. His characters are constantly flawed, strewn with cracks, by turns petty or manipulative or simply ignorant, doing things out of self-interest or boredom and seeming to not understand the consequences of their actions, or knowing them full well and doing it anyway because they just don't care. Which, in all honesty, is what makes his books worth reading. Couples is the story of a small town and the yes, couples that live in bored upper class leisure in the town and how they interact. That's pretty much it and yet it remains strangely fascinating, even though all Updike really does is play them off each other in as many permutations as he can manage until he runs out of pages. At the time I think the book was considered shocking for its frank depiction of infidelity and at times it does seem like all anyone in the town is interested in is sleeping with as many other people as possible. Yet it's not the act itself that matters, but the reasons why they do it. Beceause they're bored or they're not in love anymore or they feel constricted, because they want to get a reaction, or maybe convince themselves that they can still react. The action, as it is, tends to center around Piet, who is married to Angela but seems to still enjoy playing the field and it's what he does that drives what there is of the plot. Much like Updike's Rabbit, he's not a role model but an extremely flawed human being who does callous things and convinces himself that he's doing them out of kindness. But he just fits in with the rest of the town's couples, who drift through their days trying to find some sort of excitement amidst all the sameness, dinner parties, basketball games, vacations, lounging around to avoid the notion that they're just killing time. Not every character is as well drawn, and telling some of the minor characters apart can be difficult at times. But the main ones linger and resonate, in all their loves and foibles, their jealousies and their loyalties. Updike's prose remains as sharp as ever, he rarely builds to explosions of excitement but instead moves it along in tiny charges, creating little waves that over time become devastating. Sometimes he gets a bit carried away with the descriptive metaphors but that's par for the course for him, it's his style. His dialogue is especially good, even when it's being elusive, it can suddenly shift to cutting and raw and the best scenes are the ones with all the couples together as they dance and dart around each other, revealing by not revealing. The bits between the stronger characters, like Piet and Freddy Thorne, go to another level entirely. It's not a happy book, more about people existing and making the wrong choices, and how those poor choices can come back to haunt them. These days the idea of the suburban life only hiding a miserable bored existence fraught with infidelities is nearly a cliche but Updike's prose and viewpoint still elevate it. You may not like his character but you'll feel like you know them, for better or for ill.

Updike makes the reader feel like a voyeur privy to the most intimate acts and discussions in the characters' lives. We are transported to the fictional New England town of Tarbox in the 60's and introduced to its suburban inhabitants. They have cocktail parties and play tennis and basketball and raise children and discuss politics, consumerism, gossip, and sex. Yet beyond its Peyton Place scenario, the characters are truly complex, searching for answers, happiness, joy, excitement, anything!

Updike brilliantly blends literary prose and imagery with frank situations and absorbing dialogue to create a beautiful American portrait that is extraordinarily accurate. It satisifes the reader's quest for truth, drama, and philisophical stimulation.

I have read this novel 3 times and become completely imersed and enthralled each time.

When I recently saw the author on a talk show on C-SPAN, he seemed to keep reminiscing about how this 1968 book in particular marked a turning point in his notoriety. Naturally, as one who had already read a ton of Updike (but not this volume), I was intrigued. And I was glad when I finally did read it, for it turns out to be a deliciously lyrical description of how a small group of married people in a coastal town engage in extramarital sex and other forms of innocent seeming behavior and how it all blows up in their faces – quietly, oh so quietly. Updike is testing the ice for us (indeed, one section is named “Thin Ice”). He is helping us judge the New Morality. Will it work, or does it simply displace a more established code of sexual ethics for a while, then vanish? Thirty-five odd years later, the Pill and other forms of birth control have still failed to make marriage obsolete; “wife-swapping” is still not widely practiced. So perhaps Updike was on to something here (namely, that marital fidelity has its place in our scheme of things). The famous graphic sex this novel is supposed to contain? Well, it’s pretty tame stuff these days, but the directness of the sexual descriptions is still delightfully scintillating and refreshing. The best thing about the book though is its characters’ dialog. Updike wouldn’t know how to fill a page with bland verbiage if he tried, and this book is no exception. But unlike the “Rabbit” novels, these characters are always making exotic observations, expressing themselves in a surprising, distinctive, and endlessly entertaining manner. ... Still a terrific read, however (and you may always disagree with me about the ending!).

I have to admit, much like porn, I bought the book based on its cover. "Seductive" Savagely graphic" etc. These are the things that make me spend 13 bucks. However, what was considered lewd and graphic back in the '60's is downright quaint today. What we're left with, however, is another Updike masterpiece. No one knows the suburbs like Updike and he once again demonstrates his mastery over this terrain here. Despite the Biblical overtones of the ending (which seemed forced and completely out of the flow of this otherwise seemless novel) this is a book that you fall into like a comfy couch. It takes a while to keep the characters straight and the fact that each of them takes up with another's spouse only complicates matters further but once you become familiar with everyone the sparks almost crackle off the page. There's a reason this guy's so famous.

John Updike put a damper on my reading and writing. Smug, drawn-out and decadent, "Couples" prevented me from going about my usual business because I kept hoping that "it", whatever it was, would finally start and do Updike's name and his biggest commercial success justice. With a lot of goodwill I might say that something with a remote ring of truth began to emerge in the last 100 or so pages, but applying an 80/20 ratio to a novel of this size and reputation is to expect a lot. Updike's trademark imagery, more prominent in later works, appears in bud stages throughout the book and, admittedly, gives the content some much-needed embellishment (for instance, "an orange in the net" is the sun setting through bare tree branches.)

I am not quite sure what Updike was up to with this. Assuming he had calculated the mild scandal the book would cause, then the story about swinger club in a small, but apparently vastly overpopulated Boston suburb came out darn humorless. If it was a morality tale, it left me stone cold. Published 40 years ago, it doesn't even hold up as a snapshot of its time, despite some news clips dusted here and there. Swinging Sixties, The Pill and middle-class indolence notwithstanding, I simply don't see people acting like that--and I am NOT talking about the so-called sexual candor. The only ones whose behavior resembled anything candid were the whiny children, certainly not the sorry excuses for characters of the rest of the bloated cast, until nearly the end. I was disturbed, however, by how insincerely the word "love" was thrown around and what hypocrisy was supposed to pass for emotion. Let's take a closer look at the crowd: There's Piet Hanema, the protagonist, who is a churchgoer while promiscuous--this one is a giveaway and I won't be hung up on it; the church tower, the landmark of the town, carries a rotating rooster--get it? Cock-a-doodle-do? More witticisms: Piet's, um, head mistress, among several, is Foxy Whitman (she had ivory looks but is, well, foxy). There are the Thornes (they sting), the Applebys (they are red-cheeked and chubby), the Smiths (they try to counteract their ordinariness by showing off their school French) and many more, everyone sleeps with everyone at some point (or so it seems), except Piet's wife, a cornerstone of class and principle in a morass of sin. In the middle of this, the periodically surfacing concerns about discovery or worries about offending partners seems conceitedly out of place. Should one believe that Mr. Hanema is sucking breast milk from Mrs. Whitman in their friends' bathroom but is nervous about parking his truck in front of her house? And that his wife, or anyone, for that matter, can be shocked by anything? I don't think so. Devoting an entire, long chapter to the wife-swappings of the "Applesmiths", two minor pathetic couples (out of ten pathetic couples, a daring premise in itself) and expecting the reader to care, or burdening her with their family history is what is audacious, not their fumbling and groping.

At long last, however, the party's over, and the hangover kicks in. That is when Updike's imitation of conflict begins to grasp and acuminates into the reasonably interesting conclusion that the oh-so liberal, open-minded, immoral ones are usually just as square and subject to hurt as the next ones. But, for a reading experience about the same subject--moral decline in suburbia--I hotly recommend "Revolutionary Road" by Richard Yates instead. He did it earlier, better and much funnier. If it's a motion picture you'd rather get done with, the movie is being released at the end of the year. Until then, rent "The Decline of the American Empire" by Denys Arcand.

John Updike is one of our great novelists. This certainly explains why I have read and enjoyed SEEK MY FACE, GERTRUDE AND CLAUDIUS, and MEMORIES OF THE FORD ADMINISTRATION, as well as the lesser VILLAGES, in recent years. Further, my shelves carry ten additional Updike novels in hardcover. All of them, even the sly BECH books, were terrific reads. So why did this Updike novel take me nearly two months to finish?

I suppose the ambitiousness of COUPLES is the cause. In contrast to, say, GERTRUDE AND CLAUDIUS, which tells of the story of a certain prominent couple, COUPLES tells the story of a not-small group (18 characters) of upper middle class New England suburbanites and their sexual shenanigans.

In this very close-knit group, there are two-sets of two married couples (eight people altogether) who swap mates. Further, there is a character who has a quickie with a swapper, as well as three lovers among the wives, whose husbands don't play. Here, two of the husbands may be gay while another is a stiff and unlikable associate professor who is conveniently away during the day.

In COUPLES, Updike tells us everything there is to know about this intense and incestuous group, whose members, but for their sexual adventurism, are very average and even annoying. (One interacts pretentiously using French phrases. Another is sour and a high-ball nihilist.)

Maybe in these jaded times, roughly 40 years after the events in COUPLES, the sexual revolution that these characters embody is simply not very involving. Indeed, my reaction to these couples after our two-month journey together is not amazed interest but the impression that their lives are sad, unrewarding, and claustrophobic.

Even so, COUPLES, is like other Updike's novels in the astonishing lyricism of his prose.

This is a prototypical Updike novel, in my opinion. Here he tackles the convoluted longings and messy interpersonal relationships between Foxy and her contractor Piet. Foxy is married, of course, but that doesn't stop our randy boy Piet from trying to bed her. Set in a tense New England town, the dour weather and the hard-edge environment may have something to do with Foxy's dissatisfaction, with her husband and with life in general. The much-about-town Piet just views Foxy as another conquest, but serious complications occur when something happens to Foxy, and Piet's own life starts to unravel.

Other reviewers have panned this book or damned it with faint praise, but I enjoyed it a lot. It is a faster read than the Rabbit novels, less serious in tone, perhaps lighter in writing, but with serious, dark issues the characters must face.

Updike seems to be saying, 'every action has a consequence'. Highly recommended. Perhaps one has to be familiar with the period to give it five stars. I could place much of the angst of the period, though I was too young to have lived it like Piet and Foxy.