Suburban Surfeit

...Couples is a social novel in which events, such as the assassination of President Kennedy, have some fleeting impact on the characters...

...but it is equally true that his novels have often seemed formulaic and lacking in punch...

...But for all this, for all the experimentation to find a more flexible THE PROGRESSIVE form, Couples is not a satisfying book...

...But no characters, not even Piet and Foxy, are quite able either to rise above it or to commit themselves to being drowned by it...

...They just get along, not especially sympathetically, as part and parcel of what is finally little more than the evil of banality...

...and the characters are left with only a dull, imprecise craving which they try to satisfy with a destructive ritual of fun and games—the compulsive, communal sex and togetherness which function as religion's surrogate in our times...

...However, Couples, his most recent work, is quite different...

...It lasts until her baby is born, is briefly resumed afterward, and ultimately involves the two of them in a tragi-comic abortion...

...It is suburban limbo, all of whose official gods are dead...

...This has been his strength, but one senses that it has also been his limitation...

...Although the focus of the novel shifts from one character to another among the ten couples who comprise the inner core of Tarbox society, it concentrates on Piet Hanema, a middle-aged contractor whose marriage and family life, instead of being regenerative, have gone indefinably bad...

...They are social creatures in the most precise sense of the phrase, and Updike tries to strike a reciprocal balance between their inner tensions and the way that they are affected by the social milieu in which they move...

...It will possibly surprise a few of the author's admirers and surely irritate the literary Establishment which has previously touted Updike so highly...

...Reviewed by Peter Collier John Updike's fiction has always been marked by that effortless, almost intuitive finesse which teachers of creative writing call "style...

...Instead of being polished, it is rough, almost ungainly...

...his mastery over form seems to have come too easily, enclosing themes that are ultimately too calculated...

...Unlike the other Tarboxians, who careen passively along a gin-sipping, wife-swapping course, Piet and Foxy divorce their respective spouses and, after a brief separation meant to be purifying, get married...

...No less than the teeming world from which it is supposed to be a retreat, Tarbox is an empty society...

...It describes a world we know is there —a world of incredible boredom and bewilderment, a world of sexual and spiritual abuse...

...It is quite true, for instance, that he can anatomize a character in a single deft passage and that his language is as imaginative and lively as any other contemporary American writer's...

...The other Tarbox couples drift apart, finding new games-mates and suburbs...

...If anything, Updike's writing, brilliant though it can be, has seemed to cost him too little...

...In its preoccupation with middle-class sex and suburbia, the book will doubtless remind some of a literate Peyton Place...

...Couples takes place in a small community named Tarbox, a New England "post-pill paradise" where, Updike says, "the men had stopped having careers and the women had stopped having babies...

...When a new couple, the Whitmans, enter Tarbox, Piet almost immediately has an affair with the pregnant Foxy Whitman...

...rather than being too much in control, Updike seems to have bitten off more than he can conveniently chew...

...Piet weaves in and out of the other couples' lives, as they do his, having spiritless affairs with the women and casual friendships with the men...