Couplings

...I am wary of reprinting these gooey ecstasies lest my typewriter keys get stuck together, but a small non-sentence should suffice to convey the tone: "Foxy's powdery armpits and petaled cleft simpler than a rose...

...For reasons that are difficult to imagine Updike has elected to raid the fictional territories occupied by John O'Hara, Peter De Vries, and Mary McCarthy (not to say Grace Metalious...

...We get a packed year of the elaborate couplings and re-couplings of ten marriages, with adulterous affairs involving six of the men and either eight or nine of the women (depending on whether the reader decides that Terry, Piet's partner's wife, seen cavorting in the ocean with her lute teacher's husband, is Up To No Good...

...a later confrontation of the Hanemas and the Whitmans is dully reminiscent of the confrontation of Gatsby and the Buchanans at the Plaza, and Piet displays a trace of Gatsby's quixotism...

...As a most enthusiastic admirer of Updike's, standing in a rubble of dashed expectations, I can only try to isolate some of the causes of the disaster...

...Why all this fuss about bodies...

...He shows passion in a Boston broker in i masterly image: "Ringlets of vibration, fine as watch springs, oscillated on the surface of his Gibson...

...when Piet stands up to dress, he observes, "Like butter on a bright sill her nakedness was going rancid...

...A similar thing happens at the climax of the leaden Hanema-Whitman confrontation when the Whitman baby burps...

...At the end of the novel the Congregational church burns down as some sort of moral lesson to Piet and Foxy, and Piet feels a "lightness in his own heart, gratitude for having been shown something beyond him, beyond all blaming...

...Some sentences would be at home in the Rover Boys series ("She handed her can to—Ken...

...Piet's first mistress, Georgene the dentist's wife, is a vision of "kitten-chin glutinous with jism," her "strangely prominent coccyx" is "the good start of a tail...

...Here is Piet's view of a small bug: "a citizen out late, seen from a steeple...

...First, and very much in Couples' foreground, is an endless sexual explicitness that succeeds quickly in making sex revolting and succeeds ultimately in making it boring...

...His third mistress, Bea the rich man's wife, is somewhat passive, and Piet stirs her up in classic fashion: "He spat between her breasts and lifted his arm as if to club her...

...The symbolism is similarly ham-handed and grandiose...

...A related failing is portentousness...

...Piet's one-night-stand, Carol, the wife of the jet pilot, paints her nipples orange, and her feet "stank like razor clams...

...His second, Rabbit, Run, is a fine book despite weak spots...

...All that this enthusiast and fan can do is insist again on the formidable range of his gifts, and hope that for his next novel he will return to his normal scope and to the true country of his imagination...

...The material of a real novel, the story of Piet's affair with Foxy and its consequence in the collapse of both of their marriages, has been inflated until it becomes grotesque, two worms lost in a tangle of other worms in a bait can...

...The novel has epigraphs from Tillich and Blok that would not disgrace a treatise on Pre-Lapsarian Predestination...

...There is an effort to make Piet, whose work is building and restoring houses, into an avatar of old-fashioned ethics and handicraft against present-day fraud and shoddy...

...we are told that the collapse of Piet's marriage has been "sacrificial" to them (which seems to mean that they switch to playing bridge in the evenings...

...Shortly after, they pop into bed together and Harold's dream comes true: "Trembling as if whipped, he licked her eyelids and sucked her toes, one by one...

...Many of the tropes are far-fetched and strained: "Carrying within her like a contraceptive loop her knowledge of her lover...

...In the most blatant of melodramatic touches, he has Freddy Thome the dentist, Georgene's husband, insist on a night with Angela as his price for getting an abortion for Foxy, pregnant with Piet's child...

...If the sex scenes suggest everybody from Walter Benton to Henry Miller, other scenes raise other ghosts...

...What he was shown is beyond all knowing, too, so far as I am concerned, since everything is made pointless at the end: Piet and Foxy marry, move to a nearby town, and are "accepted as another couple...

...Harold Smith the broker, walking down a Boston street with his best friend's wife, Janet, wonders "what it would be like to suck each dirty one of ten toes clean...

...Adultery lit her from within, like the ashen mantle of a lamp, or as if an entire house of gauzy hangings and partitions were ignited but refused to be consumed and, rather, billowed and glowed, its structure incandescent...

...This is usually confined to Piet's second mistress and true love, Foxy Whitman, the wife of a college teacher...

...Piet talks to Georgene on the phone in his office in a scene of wonderful comic double talk: Georgene teils him her sexual miseries, and Piet, for his partner's ear, translates his end of the conversation into details of home restoration...

...None of John Updike's five novels has been entirely satisfactory...

...a salami sandwich is "minced death...

...Like in the catacombs," and "a conspiracy to protect each other from death...

...They range from a tiny scenic effect (the high dunes on the beach Uttered with abandoned underpants), to a brilliant account of the Kennedy assassination as Foxy hears the news in Freddy Thome's dentist chair...

...The weathercock on the Congregational church that Piet and Foxy attend has a bright copper eye, which may be the eye of God, watching their sins...

...To give the story a spurious seriousness, at various times the book's couples are described as a "church," "a subversive cell...

...Perhaps the wages of sin is more jerry-building, since "The carpentry in there [the church] can never be duplicated...

...The electric chair dustless in the tiled room," could have been lifted from early Auden...

...The hamster had never been given cause for fear and must have felt none until claws sprang from a sudden heaven fragrant with the just-discovered odors of cat and cow and dew...

...Work it out, fella," he says, "his face very ugly, the underside of some soft eyeless sea creature whose mouth doubles as an anus...

...Piet asks plaintively at one point...

...It is a strong contender in the most-ill-advised-work-by-a-writer-of-great-talent sweepstakes...

...an olive in a martini is a "tame green egg...

...Updike has a redeeming sense of comedy that saves him from his worst excesses...

...Finally, parts of the book seem derivative and secondhand...

...What can only be called Updike's wit produces a few modest and perfect touches...

...The first chapter of his third novel, The Centaur, is an immortal masterpiece on the order of the Circe chapter of Ulysses...

...And here is the life and death of a hamster, seen in hamster consciousness: "Several times the hamster had nosed his way out and gone exploring in her room...

...toward morning an innocent giant in a nightgown had admitted a lion with a mildewed eye...

...No book by a gifted writer could be wholly bad, and Couples is not...

...One of the ingredients of this appears to be a revulsion with the body sometimes expressed by Piet Hanema, the most active adulterer among the ten couples in Tarbox, Massachusetts, whose doings, mainly sexual, we follow for a year...

...A long list of death images beginning "The Chinese knife across the eye...

...In this perspective we learn that his plump wife Angela has "thick-thighed legs" with varicose veins, "suprisingly luxuriant pudenda," and that she is addicted to Lesbian fancies and masturbation...

...But the actual night, Angela fortified by her copy of Beyond the Pleasure Principle ("It's very severe and elegant"), Freddy terrified, pudgy, and impotent, is wonderfully funny and successful...

...Most unusual for Updike is the bad prose of Couples...

...Last night he had made it downstairs, discovering in the moon-soaked darkness undreamed-of continents, forests of furniture legs, vast rugs heaving with oceanic odors...

...Even an occasional Malamud touch is apparent, as when Piet says win-ningly to Angela, "My stomach is a ball of acid...

...Another basic mistake of the book is gigantism...

...To compensate for the bad prose there are some triumphs of style, with gigantism this time used comically...

...His first girl, Annabel, remains a lovely memory of a "rank elastic crotch," or "How Annabel would spread her legs as if imperiously to seize his entire face in the lips of her young swamp...

...One night with Angela...

...The sexual practices of Piet and Foxy include some that the Kama Sutra assures us can only be performed by specially-trained hummingbirds...

...Nothing is too insignificant for this sort of inflation: a slice of lemon in a bowl of consomme is "an embryo...

...or late Steinbeck ("Amid laughter and beer and white wine, through the odors of brine and tennis sweat, the play was passed around"), or any woman's magazine ("Yet he had lifted and hurled thousands of lives safely across the continent...

...Updike's slice of life, to vary the figure once more, is so large that the reader chokes on it...

...There are several fleeting reminiscences of The Great Gatsby: a scene in which Georgene judges Piet and Foxy ("Having coaxed the abortion from their inferiors, they were quite safe") reminds the reader of Nick's description of Tom and Daisy after Daisy has killed Myrtle...

...This novel, Updike's fifth, is his most ambitious and worst...

...Foxy is Sleeping Beauty, and Piet has awakened her from a bad marriage that was "seven years' sleep...

...Nor is this repulsive imagery confined to Piet...

...Other achievements in the novel come from Updike's habitual perspectives by incongruity...

...Worse in a way than the revolting is its opposite, what Yeats called in regard to his own early verse a "disagreeable sentimental sensuality...