John Updike, Couples

     I started reading Updike around the time of his death in 2009. I was fascinated to hear on the radio that he considered himself a Christian AND that he was a double-Pulitzer winner. I’ve read a half dozen of his novels in the time since, beginning with Rabbit Run, when I was, like the protagonist and his creator, 26. Naturally I had trouble waiting the logical next ten years for Rabbit Redux.

     Couples reads a lot like the Rabbit books in that it focuses on suburban marriages in crisis. Piet Hanema is similar to Rabbit, one could say similar to a lot of Updike’s protagonists, in that he has a vast array of sexual conquests and just enough of a macho aloofness to keep the consequences from weighing on him too heavily. Updike’s main charm—his rich, poetic narrative voice—captures the readers in a kind of alien logic. Every sentence sounds true, but somehow it leads us down peculiar paths (who would have guessed you could win two Pulitzers writing sympathetically about a Republican?). Updike’s characters seem thick skinned—impervious to the sort of anxiety that might keep the rest of us on good behavior. The Updike-archetype is vaguely religious, center-right, blue collar, and just a little too intellectually and ethically nimble for his own good.

      There’s a lot sex in Couples (not quite more than an average Updike reader has come to anticipate, though). While I don’t think he meant to castigate his characters here (he obviously relished creating these scenes), it’s hard to say that their behavior is meant to be understood as normative. Where Updike’s own ethical compass is within all this is hard to say—it’s probably blowing around, pointing wildly in all different directions like the shining weathercock atop the church caught between fire and rain in the novel’s end. I judge the sexuality here as needless inasmuch as it is meant to be a kind of wouldn't-it-be-cool? wish fulfillment for readers. I see it as an important part of the work inasmuch as Updike simply means to be honest about the nature of human desire and experience.  Infidelity offers for the couples a new and liberating adventure, and for a time it seems Updike means merely to be another free love voice of the sexual revolution (some would say he sparked that revolution) but, alas, in time the adulterous couples find that “constraints aping marriage develop” between them (554). I choose to understand what is depicted here as descriptive rather than prescriptive. Updike describes something going on, something he likely took part in himself, but he stops short of idealization. Piet ends the novel happy, but not necessarily unpunished for all his infidelity—more rewarded than we might have anticipated, but not necessarily celebrated. Rather than present his final relationship as a new and dramatic love, we learn in the end that he and his new lover are merely “another couple,” re-married now, and not unlikely to re-suffer the ordinary barriers (557).