Couples (novel)
First edition
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| Author | John Updike |
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| Country | United States |
| Language | English |
| Publisher | Knopf |
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Publication date
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1968 |
| Pages | 458 |
| LC Class | PZ4.U64 Co3 |
Couples is a 1968 novel by American author John Updike.
The novel focuses on a promiscuous circle of ten couples in the small Massachusetts town of Tarbox. (The author was living in Ipswich, Massachusetts when he composed the book.)
Much of the plot of Couples (which opens on the evening of March 24, 1962 and integrates historical events like the loss of the USS Thresher on April 10, 1963, the Profumo affair, and the Kennedy assassination in November 1963) concerns the efforts of its characters to balance the pressures of Protestant sexual mores against increasingly flexible American attitudes toward sex in the 1960s. The book suggests that this relaxation may have been driven by the development of birth control and the opportunity to enjoy what one character refers to as "the post-pill paradise."
The book is rich in period detail. (In 2009, USA Today called the novel a "time capsule of the era.) The lyrical and explicit descriptions of sex, unusual for the time, made the book somewhat notorious. TIME magazine had reserved a cover story for Updike and the novel before knowing what it was about; after actually reading it they got embarrassed and discovered that "the higher up it went in the Time hierarchy, the less they liked it."
The ten couples are:
The novel was widely and enthusiastically reviewed, landing Updike on the cover of Time, a rare location for an author.Time, while detailing similarities between real Ipswich and fictional Tarbox ("it is worth noting that the Updikes are the ringleaders of a group of like-minded couples whom the older Ipswichers call the Junior Jet Set. Updike has organized endless basketball, volleyball and touch-football games, led the jet set on skiing trips, and presided over countless intramural parties. Says one member of the set: 'What we have evolved is a ritual. It sets up a rhythm where we are all available to each other. It's rather as if all of us belong to a family.' Adds another friend without elaboration: 'You can't sustain that very long without its being very destructive'"), called the book "sensational." Critic and novelist Wilfred Sheed, in the New York Times Book Review, found Couples "ingenious" and "scorching...the games are described with loving horror." Addressing of the novel's famous frankness about sexual manners, Sheed wrote, "If this is a dirty book, I don't see how sex can be written about at all. Updike's treatment of sex is central to his method, which is that of a fictional biochemist approaching mankind with a tray of hypersensitive gadgets."
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