Revisit:
Couples
by John Updike
Ballantine Books
1968
Revisit is a series of reviews highlighting past releases that now deserve a second look.
“It’s sex that disorders our normally ordered lives,” Philip Roth writes in The Dying Animal. Most of John Updike’s characters, his bored women and permanently restless men, are familiar with this concept, but their sexual transgressions read like half-intentional invocations of that disorder rather than blind stumbles. It’s as if, either as reaction to boredom or mid-life complacency, they (especially his men) posses an inborn desire to screw things up.
This is especially true in Couples, possibly his best novel, which has been unfairly maligned as a ‘dirty’ book, a wife-swapping relic of ’60s saturnalia. But the novel is not a sex romp. There’s no more sex than the usual Updike novel; instead, it functions as a prescient indictment of the still incipient sexual revolution, as well as a withering piece of suburban satire.
The story takes places within the confines of Tarbox, a Boston suburb transitioning from its days as a quaint coastal village. Its focus is a group of city expatriates, with children and pets and charming saltbox houses, who we follow at work and at play. There’s a strong emphasis on the latter, and the novel flits from one social situation to another, to trysts to cocktail parties to sordid combinations of the two. The sex is for the most part traditional, even boring, and the one occurrence of wife-swapping is tinged with regret and sour feelings. These are people emerging from a kind of Puritan darkness, and their first willful lapses are suitably clumsy.
In some ways it’s Revolutionary Road writ large, with the urge for escape replaced by the more pointless outlet of the sexual exploit. The characters get together to drink, flirt, play party games and bemoan the suburban philistines that surround them. They’re dull, mistaken elitists, but unlike Yates there’s hardly any concern for half-hearted humanism. Updike presses these characters arrogant unpleasantness for laughs and social commentary. Piet Hanama, the masculine Dutch protagonist, is a child posing as a man, a sexual user who masks his behavior with a sheen of boyish innocence. The couples in the story, while largely remaining fixed, pair off in their spare time, a repeated mixing that’s viewed with the sterile detachment of a lab experiment. One person latches on to another, then another, ad nauseam, without any real pleasure or satisfaction. It’s an empty exercise, and often enough they get caught. In some ways this seems to be the point; these characters sow disorder with an eye for its ability to shake up otherwise dry lives.
Beneath this lies a faintly ritualistic subtext, a competitive undercurrent where the hope of religion is replaced by the open-ended promise of infidelity, where one unsatisfying affair always leaves the possibility for another. It’s not a coincidence that Piet is deeply and faultily religious, a churchgoer whose fraudulent religiousness parallels his disingenuous personality. In a 1968 review in the New York Times, Wilfrid Sheed wrote of the book’s fascination with religious rites, their transubstantiation into “touch football, sacrificial party games and ceremonial bibulations.”
Couples is by no means a perfect novel. It’s not as complete as a small masterpiece like Of the Farm or as persistently memorably as the Rabbit series. Most of its characters are too sketchily drawn, its plot too gossipy and busy, to be totally razor-sharp. There’s a widespread confusion for nearly the first hundred pages while we try to desperately souse out exactly who is who among the thick welter of couples after their introduction at a cocktail party.
It’s a device that is probably intentional but muddling all the same. One character speaks in French accent, one character has cancer, and while these quick signifiers serve as indications of overwhelming inner shallowness (and also a handy character guide) they also speak of an inability to fully develop these people in such a hothouse climate. Yet the ones that are developed – Piet, his lover Foxy, the malicious dentist Freddy Thorne – create enough of a central focus, leaving a smaller inner cadre surrounded by a quietly babbling chorus.
Suburbia has become such a desiccated topic, obsessively dwelled on by teenagers, repeatedly misinterpreted by Sam Mendes, that it’s hard to remember any possibly vitality in its examination. But Couples is one of those rare cases, a great suburban novel, one that dwells on the minutiae of a lifestyle in service of a broader assessment. As a sardonic, open-eyed representation of the ’60s, viewed from the ground, it’s certainly unmatched.
by Jesse Cataldo
