The first breath of adultery is the freest; after it,
constraints aping marriage develop.
I had never read anything by
John Updike, so I didn’t know what all the hype was about until I began Couples. The hype is due. He is
one hell of a writer.
So repulsive, Freddy assumed the easy intrusiveness of
a very attractive man.
Magnolia buds swollen by heat
I went down to swim–delicious, like being inside a diamond
Rather, Updike is one hell of a thinker, because you have to think of these countless metaphors, insights, and poignant images, in order to write them down. The linguistic fruits flourish so lushly on each page that you have to stop trying to acknowledge each one, lest you never finish the book. He’s funny, too, obviously. I don’t even mind the self-indulgent wanderings and bold generalizations.
Every marriage is a hedged bet. Foxy entered hers
expecting that, whatever fate held for them, there were certain kinds of abuse
it would never occur to her husband to inflict. He was beyond them, as most
American men are beyond eye-gouging and evisceration. She had been right. He
had proved not so much gentle as too fastidious to be cruel.
Every marriage tends to consist of an aristocrat and a
peasant. Of a teacher and a learner.
With these I stopped and
thought, “Is this true? Have I felt that way?” and recruited experiences to
weight the balance.
The novel is about marriages and everyone cheating on each other, in a
Waspy little town in the American northeast. I imagine the book was more
shocking when it was published in 1968 than it is now, almost 50 years later.
“I can think of no other
novel, even in these years of our sexual freedom, as sexually explicit in its
language… as direct in its sexual reporting, as abundant in its sexual
activities,” wrote Diana Trilling for The
Atlantic Monthly. [This is on the back cover, like an advertisement.]
Game of Thrones is more
abundant in sexual activities, I can tell you, after binge-watching the first
two seasons this Christmas. So what struck me more than the sex–although I did
have a huge laugh when one character refers to a blow job as ‘sodomy’–were the descriptions of people and their perceptions: so precise and novel, yet potentially recognizable.
When Foxy prods her husband and realizes he would never cheat on
her:
“Well, they say a man gets his first mistress when his
wife becomes pregnant.”
He looked over at her too surprised to speak, and she
realized that he was incapable of betraying her, and marveled at her own
disappointment.
How two cheating partners feel about their spouses:
They talked [...] about Harold and Janet, who, as they obligingly continued
to be deceived, were ever more tenderly considered, so that they became almost
sacred in their ignorance, wonderful in their fallibility, so richly forgiven
for their frigidity, demandingness, obtuseness, and vanity that the liaison
between their spouses seemed a conspiracy to praise the absent.
"General courtesy" becoming the force behind two couples swapping partners:
…obligingness had become a
part of it; they had reached, the Applesmiths, the boundary of a condition
wherein their needs were merged, and a general courtesy replaced individual
desire. The women would sleep with the men out of pity, and each would permit
the other her man out of an attenuated and hopeless graciousness. Already a
ramifying tact and crossweave of concern were giving their homes an unhealthy
hospital air.
And, fine, some sexy stuff:
…until, he biting her, she
clawed his back and came. Could break his neck. Forgotten him entirely. All raw
self. Machine that makes salt at the bottom of the sea.
Mouths, it came to Piet, are
noble. They move in the brain’s court. We set our genitals mating down below
like peasants, but when the mouth condescends, mind and body marry. To eat another
is sacred.
[Foxy writing to Piet] ...the softness of the air, stepping from the plane in San
Juan, like a kiss after fucking–oh lover, forgive me, I am sleepy.
After weeks of chastity I remember lovemaking as an
exploration of a sadness so deep people must go in pairs, one cannot go alone.
