Sex and the Small Town

...At MIT Owen meets a student who is attractive, brilliant, and immersed in elusive mathematical theory...

...The fact that her father is a professor of English literature adds to Owen's perception of her class superiority...

...Phyllis had hoisted him up into Cambridge and the...

...I am tempted to think Updike is pulling our leg, veering away from the autobiographical...

...He wants to tell us about his own life and what he has made of growing older...

...This catalog leads Updike serenely toward his ultimate denouement: "The parts of ourselves conventional decency calls shameful are exalted...

...The epigraph that opens the novel, a passage from Matthew Arnold's moving poem "Dover Beach," reads: Ah love, let us be true To one another...

...Though not quite as serious or thoughtful, and surely not as eloquent, as Arnold, Updike shares with him a dismayed response to the decline of religion...

...As the fighting abroad went on, he and his best friend, Buddy Rourke, aided the War effort by collecting flattened cans for scrap metal...

...Despite these careless drifts into carnality, Updike knows what he is up to...

...Karen had been the least trouble...

...Turning rapidly to Owen's childhood in Pennsylvania, the septuagenarian author shows that his confident, resilient prose is still with him, and that nostalgia is perhaps its strongest force...

...Their story may be the novel's single gesture toward traditional romance...

...Readers who think Updike is sex-obsessed may be accused of being finicky...

...And he may be hinting to his church—which seems to be a persistent presence in his mind—that it cannot annul Nature's pronouncement...

...By wrapping his prose like a thick towel around his characters, Updike has blurred the book's focus...

...On one hand, he welcomes release from the severe code of conduct religion imposes on matters sexual...

...Here he focuses on our domination by the Internet (he captures its impersonal, clicking prose), the dangers of outsourcing Americanjobs, and the frivolity bequeathed to young women who, by access to the Pill, could now engage in frequent casual sex without fear...

...He senses there is something shameful about it, but also something important and true...

...His lips puffy with sleep, Owen is in no mood to reciprocate—"it feels like an attempt to suffocate him...

...Overwhelmed with admiration, he pursues and eventually marries Phyllis...

...To judge by this book, as well as his recent critical writings in the New Yorker and elsewhere, Updike's own energy and talent are still very much in evidence...

...Through all these recollections we have been waiting to see how Owen deals with old age...

...But sex—usually adulterous—is the key to self-fulfillment in Villages...

...By describing it esthetically, in terms of pale skin reddening, moisture and climax, Updike has become America's meteorologist of sex, saving himself from any exhausting attempt to get at the personalities of Owen's lovers...

...Julia teaches him good manners, telling him not to slurp his soup...

...to her in her generation it had been no big deal, like a coffee break___Mirabella, especially Mirabella with her spun-sugar hair, brought transcendent value to the act, the supreme interaction...

...it rubs him, as people used to say, the wrong way...

...His mother first says sharply, "Don't touch it...

...After Phyllis' death, the plot takes up Owen's second marriage, to Julia...

...Updike has always been vigorous and exact in noticing major changes in American culture and society...

...On the other, he is unhappy to lose its emotional support when he ignores its rules...

...We are told that we shine, that we are splendid, and the naked bodies we were given in the bloody moments of birth hold all the answers that another, the other desires, now and forever...

...Later she expl ains with a laugh, "It's a storkstopper...

...Looking back, he is touched by how completely his two wives delivered what he asked...

...Updike is giving himself and his readers what he considers an enormous gift: the guiltless pleasure of sex...

...On one occasion Owen notices a suspicious soft white object on the ground and asks what it is...

...Now that Owen is facing his failures, it is both comic and not a little jarring for him to divert himself, and us, to precise, merry descriptions of how his favorite sex partners achieve orgasm: "Dear Faye, apparently, flirted on the edge, but with an infectious, innocent gaiety that made her easy to love...

...As the novel shifts to Owen's college years and adulthood, it becomes clear that the purpose of Villages is to describe the animated, colorful life of small New England communities— where women determine the mood and forge personal connections while men are left to invent software for the Internet, to net themselves jobs and income...

...He forgives her for scolding him, aware that she needs him to be perfect...

...His hero is pulled in opposite directions...

...for the world, which seems To lie before us like a land of dreams, So various, so beautiful, so new, Hath really neither joy, nor love, nor light, Nor certitude, nor peace, nor help for pain...

...He savors the memory of neighbors on the street peddling asparagus and other greens grown in their backyards...

...when his parents would come into this downtown, which he walked through every schoolday, and which he could reconstruct store by store, house by house, in his mind's eye 60 years afterward...

...But Updike does not plan to devote this eccentric, formidably ambitious, high-strung autobiographical novel to already covered ground...

...One chapter, "How Phyllis was Won," progresses straightforwardly and is often engaging...

...And it is stunning to learn after so many fond reminiscences that his charmed life has actually been a long, dark torment of fear, desire, ambition, and guilt...

...The young Owen was a normal boy, lively and energetic, who grew up during the Franklin D. Roosevelt years of Depression and War after his family's move from the cindery industrial town of Alton to Willow, a small village where farm life controlled the day...

...Owen associates these remarks with a drawing on the schoolyard wall made of two upright lines and a mysterious object between them...

...As elusive as that passage is, the passion behind it is unmistakable...

...He could hear the languid hoof beats of horses drawing wagons to the farmers' market a half mile away...

...The novel's structure, however, is no gift to readers...

...Owen's heart always lifted...

...Sadly, it goes on too long, becomes tedious, and ends with a fatal car accident that swerves painfully toward Hollywood-style melodrama...

...life of the mind, and Julia into Haskells Crossing and the life of bourgeois repose...

...Looking back, Owen recalls most vividly Willow's center of commerce, where the Shéhérazade movie theater, Eberle's drug store, Leinbach's oyster house, and the Lutheran church were located...

...In part the latter emotion is induced by his parents...

...Reviewed by Isa Kapp Contributor, New York "Times Book Review," Washington "Post Book World," "American Scholar" John Updike can't resist opening Villages with a signature scene that has a married couple suffering an unpredictable reversal in their emotional responses to each other: "Waking early in bed, Julia hugs Owen and declares in a soft but relentless voice how much she loves him, how pleased she is by their marriage...