COUPLES - Softcover

Updike, John

Softcover

ISBN 10: 0449240231 ISBN 13: 9780449240236

Publisher: Fawcett, 1981

Synopsis

Couples is the erotic 1968 novel by John Updike which focuses on a liberated, promiscuous circle of 10 married friends in the fictional Boston suburb of Tarbox in Massachusetts. Much of the novel (which takes place from the spring of 1963 until the spring of 1964) concerns the efforts of its characters to balance the pressures of Protestant sexual mores against increasingly flexible American attitudes toward sex, swinging and group-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 circle of acquaintance is felt as a magic circle, with ritual games, religious substitutes, a priest, and a scapegoat. Its publication created a mild scandal and elicited a cover story in TIME magazine. Couples is the book that has been called " an intellectual Peyton Place." It has been assailed for its complete frankness and praised as an artful, seductive, savagely graphic portrait of love, marriage, and adultery in America. Updike captures the narcissism and wild exhibitionism of the era, when children are left to wander around howling and lonely and neurotic about death as their parents sneak in and out of each other's bedrooms. The incidents of wife-swapping are a nice blend of Noel Coward and Krafft-Ebing. Kennedy reigns triumphant and dies symbolically. The sex scenes are candid, explicit and highly erotic but not embarrassing and rank among the best written about group sex and swinging.

About this title

Review

"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." -- The Atlantic Monthly
"Trapped in their cozy catacombs, the couples have made sex by turns their toy, their glue, their trauma, their therapy, their hope, their frustration, their revenge, their narcotics, their main line of communication and their sole and pitiable shield against the awareness of death. Adultery, says Updike, has become a kind of 'imaginative quest' for successful hedonism that would enable man to enjoy an otherwise meaningless life....The couples of Tarbox live in a place and time that together seem to have been ordained for this quest." -- Time

""Couples" [is] John Updike's tour de force of extramarital wanderlust.""--The New York Times Book Review"
"Trapped in their cozy catacombs, the couples have made sex by turns their toy, their glue, their trauma, their therapy, their hope, their frustration, their revenge, their narcotic, their main line of communication and their sole and pitiable shield against the awareness of death."--"Time"
" "
"Ingenious . . . If this is a dirty book, I don't see how sex can be written about at all."--Wilfrid Sheed, "The New York Times Book Review"

"Couples" [is] John Updike s tour de force of extramarital wanderlust. " The New York Times Book Review"
Trapped in their cozy catacombs, the couples have made sex by turns their toy, their glue, their trauma, their therapy, their hope, their frustration, their revenge, their narcotic, their main line of communication and their sole and pitiable shield against the awareness of death. "Time"
""
Ingenious . . . If this is a dirty book, I don t see how sex can be written about at all. Wilfrid Sheed, "The New York Times Book Review""

Couples [is] John Updike s tour de force of extramarital wanderlust. The New York Times Book Review
Trapped in their cozy catacombs, the couples have made sex by turns their toy, their glue, their trauma, their therapy, their hope, their frustration, their revenge, their narcotic, their main line of communication and their sole and pitiable shield against the awareness of death. Time

Ingenious . . . If this is a dirty book, I don t see how sex can be written about at all. Wilfrid Sheed, The New York Times Book Review"

"Couples [is] John Updike's tour de force of extramarital wanderlust."--The New York Times Book Review

"Trapped in their cozy catacombs, the couples have made sex by turns their toy, their glue, their trauma, their therapy, their hope, their frustration, their revenge, their narcotic, their main line of communication and their sole and pitiable shield against the awareness of death."--Time

"Ingenious . . . If this is a dirty book, I don't see how sex can be written about at all."--Wilfrid Sheed, The New York Times Book Review

About the Author

John Updike was born in Shillington, Pennsylvania, in 1932. He graduated from Harvard College in 1954 and spent a year in Oxford, England, at the Ruskin School of Drawing and Fine Art. From 1955 to 1957 he was a member of the staff of The New Yorker. His novels have won the Pulitzer Prize, the National Book Award, the National Book Critics Circle Award, the Rosenthal Foundation Award, and the William Dean Howells Medal. In 2007 he received the Gold Medal for Fiction from the American Academy of Arts and Letters. John Updike died in January 2009.

Edition details

• Publisher: Fawcett
• Publication date: 1981
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 0449240231
• ISBN 13: 9780449240236
• Binding: Mass Market Paperback
• Number of pages: 480