Most Helpful Customer Reviews
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25 of 25 people found the following review helpful:
4.0 out of 5 stars
John Updike's 'Couples', 27 Jul 2002
'Couples' by John Updike revolves around a circle of affluent and heartlessly adulterous young married couples in the fictional town of Tarbox, New England. Set in the early sixties, it focuses in on Piet Hanema, a building contractor who has become somewhat estranged from his small children and his ever-more frigid wife, Angela. It is then that he becomes ensnared by the newest wife in town, Foxy Whitman, who is heavily pregnant with the child of her husband Ken. Their affair continues for the length of her pregnancy,and beyond,until disaster strikes!. Piet and Foxy find themselves in desperate need of the help of their sleaziest and, perhaps, most untrustworthy friend, Freddy Thorne.
'Couples' is, at times, uncomfortable reading. Indeed, the racy and streetwise dialogue of the couples does not always compensate for their lack of character. This is not helped by Updike's graphic and unnervingly poetic descriptions of sex, which he employs quite regularly (Hanema beds five wives within the course of the novel). However, it is Updike's impressive control of language which makes 'Couples' so readable. With its somewhat trashy premise, 'Couples' could well have been confined, like so many other bestsellers, to the forgotten pile of literary history. But Updike is a special talent. Despite his numerous high-profile critics, its Updike's ability as an artist that maintains 'Couples' freshness thirty-five years after its publication. Consider it!
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22 of 22 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
welcome to the post-pill paradise, 9 Aug 2008
The novel is set in a promiscuous, heavy drinking and well-off circle of young married friends in the fictional sea-side Boston suburb of Tarbox. The novel takes place in 1963 around the time of the assassination of JFK.
'Welcome to the post-pill paradise....'
These intentionally ironical words occur many times in Couples and give a clue to the central theme of the book. How do these young, mostly highly educated and well-to-do thirty something couples, deal with the opportunities that a new world of risk-free contraception and a more open attitude to sex offer for the first time, here in 1960's America. They have wealth, time, opportunity and the desire to experiment. Do they, the novel asks, find themselves in paradise or a kind of hell in which all previous moral absolutes have gone ?
The 8 or 9 couples live close-knit lives, sharing holidays, parties, school runs and frequently, sexual partners. Their master of ceremonies, the odious dentist Freddie, encourages this sexual freedom in which he takes virtually no part. Piet Hanema, the central male character, is an inveterate womaniser and interestingly, the only non-academic in the group, he is a carpenter. He also remains friends with all his previous partners as he is attractive and undemanding. His transgressive relationship with the heavily pregnant Foxy Whitworth causes deep rifts and disquiet in the group. Hedonistic freedom comes, Updike makes it clear, with a heavy price and Piet and Foxy pay.
The writing is wonderful. Updike at his clear, passionate and insightful best leads us deep into the lives of his characters through his way of writing from the inside out. We feel, see and experience life as lived by those characters in that time and place.
Describing his subject as "the American small town, Protestant middle class," Updike has become most famous as a "chronicler of suburban adultery". A subject which, he once wrote, "if I have not exhausted, has exhausted me." There is no sign of exhaustion in this early novel though, He writes honestly, with fire in his belly and out of anger, deep disgust as well as a desire to explain and to understand.
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13 of 14 people found the following review helpful:
4.0 out of 5 stars
Not his best, 13 Oct 2008
I've given this 4 stars which is a bit harsh and I should explain that I'm comparing it with Updike's other works which are mostly 6 out of 5. But Updike at cruise-control is still fantastic compared to most other authors at full throttle. Couples reprises the familiar themes of adultery, sex addiction (before there was a condition for it) and marital boredom. However, the conversations of the characters seemed unbelievable: all you could hear was Updike talking, or one of his alter egos. Some of the other characters, especially the women, just wouldn't talk like that. Unlike other Updike novels, this one took me a while to finish because I couldn't take that much of it in one sitting. If you've never experienced Updike, you'll still be pretty impressed at his writing. But I recommend you start with the Rabbit trilogy to get pure literary pleasure from this genius.
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