This, fellow lovers of literature, is the quintessential book about sex in suburbia. Diana Tilling of The Atlantic Monthly could not have said it better: “I can think of no other novel, even in these years of our sexual freedom, as sexually explicit in its language … as direct in its sexual reporting, as abundant in its sexual activities.”
John Updike has not written a lusty novel with garden-variety adultery and decent dialogue, mind you. “Couples” does more than brim with desire, temptation and unhappy marriages. After all, the people in the book are not all adults. There are children present. Oddly enough, some of the best parts of this novel revolve around the offspring of our desperate housewives and disparate husbands. For example, the following excerpt:
“It was a frozen bird, with a gingery red head and a black spot on its chest, a tree sparrow caught by the blizzard. Crystals adhered to its open eye, round as the head of a hatpin. In a businesslike manner that anticipated Piet’s protests, the child explained, ‘Mommy found it in the snow all stiff and I’m going to put it on the radiator to get warm and come alive again even though I know it won’t.'”
That’s enough excerpting for now; I’m obligated to delve into a summary of the plot. “Couples” takes place in Tarbox, an upper-class town where everyone loves and/or hates everyone else. There are five couples who gather at parties, going from house to house whenever they have the free time or ulterior motive. Each character has a voice, an opinion, an action, and unbelievably enough, a soul. Though it is at first rather daunting – the prospect of reading a book with 10 main characters – the names will quickly stick. Updike’s greatest talent lies in his ability to create a world in which the reader feels like he or she is eavesdropping. When someone commits adultery, paranoia and unease are immediately felt in the pages following the act of infidelity by both the adulterer and the reader.
Courtesy of Updike’s ability to create interwoven, though at times convoluted, plots, each couple has its own problems that keep the reader interested. (The following contains several spoilers, so read at your own discretion.) Piet Hanema, a serial adulterer, questions Angela’s fidelity while he juggles between being a father to his two daughters and a lover to his two main mistresses, Foxy Whitman and Georgene Thorne. The Appleby’s and little-Smith’s cheat on each other with each other, and the awkward moments when the four cross paths are awkward but humorous.
When Ben Saltz is fired from his job, Irene retaliates by making herself comfortable in Eddie Constantine’s bed; Ben and Carol Constantine get along as well. Ken Whitman is oblivious to his wife’s disloyalty, unaware that though Foxy is pregnant with his child, she is still human. The Gallagher’s, Matt and Terry, are perhaps the most stable of all the couples, seeing as the two do not appear very often in the novel. But when Piet’s extracurricular activities get in the way of his woodworking business with Matt, an argument between the best friends is inevitable.
The Guerin’s are similar to the Gallagher’s in that their presence is not as frequent, but both are appealing – Roger is faithful to Bernadette, but only because no women are appealing to him; Bernadette, however, joins the ranks as one of Piet’s main squeezes. While the other couples take advantage of their ability to produce children – fearing it, of all things – the Ong’s, John and Bernadette, attempt several times to have children of their own. Their hardships are poignant and save the novel from becoming a monotonous tale of lust-inspired sex and love-driven anger.
The alpha male of them all, Freddy Thorne, the human embodiment of the billboard from Fitzgerald’s “The Great Gatsby” with his observant eyes and god complex, puts himself in the center of their self-effacing world. His secret is the most scandalous of them all. As these five couples grow together and fall apart, lessons about fidelity, love and life can be read between the lines as simply as the trysts are committed between the sheets. Finding and understanding these lessons is an easy task, but the ultimate discovery is realizing that sex in suburbia can be an ugly thing … no matter the beauty of its beasts.

Author