In and Out of Wedlock

...By Of the Farm, his fourth novel (and his best, if only because no vapors of ambiguity protect us from its ferocious feelings), Updike had established himself as the most skillful of wife watchers...

...The prospect before us is unrelievedly uxorial and the single area of fray is in the erogenous zone...

...Actually however, it is not so much their moral barriers the Greenwood couples have let down as their verbal ones...

...Afterward, he explained, 'I had this clear vision of the Bodily Ascens-cion, of me going up and up into this incredibly soft, warm, boundless sky: you.'" For Updike, as we already know, this should constitute good going, but in fact it is only one of our Connecticut Yankee's many grueling oscillations from Sally to Ruth (romance to reality), as he faces snags and surprises he would never have run up against in King Arthur's Court...

...they choose cronies and adversaries, embark on real journeys...

...Reviewed by Isa Kapp When the main character of John Updike's Rabbit, Run makes up his mind to leave his wife and child, he whizzes off for a defiant auto ride from Pennsylvania to West Virginia, dreaming of the sweet low cottonland where he can shake off the mess behind him...

...But in Updike's fiction there is only one odyssey: away from marrige and back...

...We don't have to conjecture when we read Anna Karenina or Madame Bovary how their creators felt about them...

...The couples in Marry Me have no secrets because Updike himself is so hooked on confession ?anything connected with sin is charismatic for him...

...The great merger of the volleyball court is thrown over the net into our private lives...

...And so, from book to book, Updike writes about the same cantankerous romantic, carping worshipfully in moments of climax, pulling lofty images down under the quilts, and discerning, through the avalanche of erotic effort in Couples, Rabbit Redux and A Month of Sundays, a mountain of existential delinquencies...

...Or were we simply embarrassed for a writer who gleefully differentiated one inviting pelvis from another as he brooded, "the social fabric collapses murderously...

...He has disclosed in an interview that he likes "middles," and that his work always says, "Yes, but...

...Art," Andrei Sinyavsky has said in his diaries, "must be insolent...

...At the least it ought to be opinionated and wholehearted, and proceed from some virility of mind...

...With the exception of stalwart skeptics like Norman Podhoretz and Alfred Kazin, Updike's critics conspired with him to persuade us that he was thinking big and Biblically about all this sex in the suburbs and the sacristy...

...Marry Me is written in language a dime store clerk could settle down with ("He had hoped Sally would laugh at this, and she did, and in a mutual gush they cashed into the silver of laughter all the sad secrets they could find in their pockets...

...He is moved, in this baleful, familiar context, to compare her performance in bed with that of his first wife, Joan: "Over all, like a sky, withdrawn and cool, hangs?hovers, stands, is—is the sense of her consciousness, of her composure, of a non-committal witnessing that preserves me from claustrophobia through any descent however deep...

...She had had boy friends, a husband, a lover...

...This two-sidedness (one is almost ready to say two-facedness) may explain why it is so hard to care about the outcome of his novels...

...we can see what is what by the piquant chapter heading, "The Reacting of Ruth...

...To simplify matters, the action takes place not under the imperatives of theology (where men marry and burn) but of psychology (where they marry and are needled...

...Tolstoy and Flaubert are not ambiguous about either their admiration or their willingness to let the heroines suffer for mistakes...

...Yet we wonder why a woman like Ruth, devoted to her husband and busy putting up the roast and zipping her sons' snowsuits, should become a natural candidate for an affair...

...As we have grown accustomed to expecting, the protagonist has considerable misgivings about leaving his wife, although he makes it obvious by the use of certain catchy phrases like "Don't be too lovely for anyone else," that he is wild about Sally...

...it seemed she could rest...

...Forever wedded and pinned to a domestic landscape, the Updike hero has as far back as the stories in Pigeon Feathers been receiving homey kisses that smelled of toothpaste, and burrowing in Gerber's baby cereals and connubial warmth, even while lamenting the pragmatism of women...

...Heaven,' Jerry said one night, entering her as she crouched above him...

...They read like six unbridled vocabularies in search of a subject...

...Most of its heroes and heroines go out into the world more gallantly than Rabbit Angstrom: they wrestle with ambition, hypocrisy, social confinement...

...The real suspense of the story is precisely in this "reacting" of Ruth, who turns out to be a veritable gladiator in defense of her hearth...

...I never felt this in Joan, this sky...

...There was probably more than one reason for feeling out of place among those thick-skinned love-makers, who remained so hard and disagreeable to one another...

...Joey brings his broad-beamed second wife, Peggy, back to the farm to visit his scrappy prehensile old country mother...

...But there is no need to worry that the author is out of his element: The book is about an adulterous love affair in a Connecticut exurb, Greenwood...

...Fortunately for its readers, American literature is supported by a handsome legacy of spunk and ad-venturousness all the way from Mark Twain to Saul Bellow...

...No doubt Updike has hit upon one aspect of the contemporary truth, the one, as is often the case in his fiction, that happens to suit his disposition...

...In the second half of the novel, where lovers talk with domestic intimacy about each other's marriages, and husband and wife talk with prurient curiosity about each other's lovers, Updike may really have made an original contribution to the melancholy anatomy of marriage in recent years...

...If God had, as Updike interpreted, withdrawn from Tarbox, it was an understandable move...

...adulterating our judgment and sounding, in a more pretentious way, a lot like the old blues song: "I'm gonna put my head on the railroad track, and when the train comes by...

...The last remnants of natural reserve have withered away, and they have no reason to hold themselves in...

...I'm gonna snatch it back...

...But in Updike's work, as he veers from wrath to pity, nostalgia to reproach and identification to disdain, we feel a terrible diffuseness...

...As he explains to his minister, "It seemed safer to be in a place I know...

...She throws herself into a frank assessment of her rival's virtues ("she's almost great"), takes every advantage of her husband's attachment to his children^ goes out to dinner in a yellow decollete dress, and, lowest stratagem of all, improves her sexual responses...

...At first blush, the author's latest seems easier to take than his preceding novels...

...And right here we are tempted to succumb to one of those saddening, lyrical figures of speech Updike likes to chart emotional experiences by: "the twilight of the old morality...

...Did we, the unguided readers, feel so small because we missed some clue that the wife-swapping community of Tarbox in Couples was founded on "physical and psychic interpenetrations" that served as compensation for the disappearing Church...

...An author whose grumbles are so refined clearly has a vocation for taking marriage apart...

...Within a few hours, though, everything on the road seems inimical to him—the Amish farmer's horse and buggy, the highway system, even the customers drinking coffee in a cafe?and he zooms back to his home town...

...Ruth manages to contemplate it with extraordinary equanimity: "She judged herself improved and deepened in about the normal amount—she had dared danger and carried wisdom away, a more complete and tolerant woman...

...Perhaps morality between the sexes is so shimmery because marriage itself has become part of the blur, losing spine like one of Salvador Dali's collapsed watches...

...The institution, he maintains, has been afflicted by a dreadful condition of chumminess—a habit of living adjacently, as in the suburbs, that completely obscures the lines between mate and buddy, neighbor and friend, acquaintance and lover...

...One complication we might have expected and didn't is Ruth's brief, inconspicuous affair with Sally's husband...

...Best of all is culpability, a state of disgrace enabling one to enjoy both sin and remorse at the same time...

...And those who have read the story, "The Wait," concerning another adulterous Sally, will find ourselves even more fully at home...

...Nor are the characters strangers: The hero, Jerry, has a wife, Ruth, pleasant and intelligent but inhibited in bed (like Joan in Of the Farm and Jane in A Month of Sundays), as well as a bluff, blond, wide-hipped, sexy mistress named Sally (spit and image of Peggy in the former and not unlike Alicia in the latter...