Join today and start reading your favorite books for Free!
Rate this book!
Write a review?
one reads a lot of this about updike: “it’s really well written, but…”, “the prose soars, but…”, “the writing was great, but…”you don’t see a lot of this regarding vincent van gogh: “it’s really well painted, but…”, “the brush strokes are nice but… isn’t he just painting a flower? or some wheat? or a dirty bar?” an imperfect analogy, but close enough. updike digests reality and spits it out with such force and kaleidoscopic beauty i’d compare his description of reality against reality itself as
How innocently life ate the days.
I haven't read anything by John Updike for years so I picked up "Couples" at the library just so I could switch over to a prominent American writer for a change of pace. One of his most read books, "Couples" deals with the "new morality" that took hold amongst the young surburbanite married couples starting in the early 60's. Updike portrays this suburban culture in graphic, explicit terms, painting a picture of almost total inmorality amoung the couples of the town of "Tarbox". Even in 2011 ter...
(In November 2015, my rare-book service sold a first edition, first printing of John Updike's Couples through our eBay account [http://ebay.com/usr/cclapcenter]. Below is the write-up I did for its listing.)Like so many of the great authors of the Postmodernist era, John Updike by the late 1960s had already established himself through the usual channels of the Mid-Century Modernist age before -- he had been a staff writer for The New Yorker, where he had come directly after his stint at the Harv...
What are we gonna do -Now that all of the children have grown up?And where are we gonna go -Knowing Nobody gives us a Damn?...Games People PlayIn the Middle of the Night!- Alan Parsons, Games People PlayGod bless you please, Mrs. Robinson -Heaven holds a place for those who pray.Simon & GarfunkelThree stars? Yep.You see, I’ve been married to the same girl for forty years, and have never strayed. I did it all for love, as the song goes.Cause like a great river approaching the sea, my love just gr...
I read "Couples" while living in Greece. There is nothing more opposite than Updike and Greece. One is bereft of worldly experience and the latter is a cornucopia of it. This was one of those books you read in short spurts, coming back to it out of a feeling of duty rather than from suspense or interest.Also, it's not a book to read right after you've just married, which I did. Hence, I found it boring and irrelevant. Like everything else, reviews must take into account the flow of time concerni...
What's wonderful and aggravating about Updike all in one book. We see the same recycled themes here (parts feel very much like Marry Me and the Rabbit series, among others), which isn't a bad thing. Updike loves to focus on adultery, and he does so as well as anyone I know. Some great characters here. Love the Piet storyline and all the characters involved in it. Also love the side-story about the swinging couple; really interesting stuff there that, unfortunately, he never really comes back to....
I’m honestly a bit surprised that I picked this up. To my prejudices it was the jejune, possibly self-caricatural big bestseller, the book whose fame caused every obituary writer to narrowly cast Updike as a chronicler of upper-middle class New England marriages (Rabbit is a Pennsylvanian petit-bourgeois, as it happens). I had heard plenty of bad reports—-from personal friends, from distantly eminent judges (Martin Amis called it a “false summit” of the Updike oeuvre). But I was at a library sal...
You know when a guilty man sets about justifying his behaviour, how he strives for big philosophical words and at the same time to bring all his charm to the fore to justify the petty thing he did? Well, this entire novel is a bit like that. It's about ten couples in suburban America in the 1960s. It's like a medieval banquet of sex, climaxing with the moral equivalent of gout. Apart from anything else it's all wildly implausible. A balding middle-aged man of average intelligence and no creative...
My GOD, this was a boring book. Reading it felt like wading through a sea of treacle – every step I moved forward it pushed me back, so I was still in a random house with Piet Hanema while he had mostly unsatisfying sex with an interchangeable array of bored housewives. It’s 458 pages of quite small text. It’s always a sign of a fundamentally unsatisfying book if I know how many pages there are because I’m always rechecking in case it’s lower than I remembered and I’m closer to the end than I th...
Sometimes Updike hits the nail right on the head. Sometimes he doesn't. And when he doesn't, you're still terribly impressed by his skills.Couples misses the nail. I didn't particularly care about the inner workings of professional adulterers at mid-century – it's territory that Richard Yates covered far more sympathetically, and that Mad Men covered far more entertainingly. I mean, I get it. The characters were drawn out reasonably well (even if it was a big, messy ensemble cast), and some of t...
Sex is like money; only too much is enough. It's 1968 and religion is dying. Faith is fluttering away. Marriage is a desolate, lonely place. With death approaching, all that comforts is the welcoming arms of a lover. Sex is the new religion. But not just any sex. It's gotta be sex with someone who isn't your legally bound partner. Maybe it's the wife of your friend. The pregnant woman down the road. The town's dentist. It's time for some bed hopping. You know, the old switcheroo. Lascivious a
“Thou shalt not commit adultery” – Exodus 20:14. But days in a small town are empty and everyone needs something to fill the hole in one’s day to day living. So adultery becomes practically the only entertainment and the transgression of this commandment is no longer sin but bliss…“She seemed to float on her bed at a level of bliss little altered by his coming and going and thus worked upon him a challenge; at last she confessed he was hurting her and curled one finger around the back of his ear...
Nobody writes about infidelity quite as good as Updike. Well, Roth sometimes gets close, but particularly in Couples, the disintegration of the various couples in the small New England town is described with painful realism by John Updike. Each character is fully developed and is sometimes endearing, sometimes enraging but always compelling. After the Rabbit series, this was my favorite Updike book.
This was my first read of John Updike. Everyone who heard that I was reading it said that they'd read it when they were a teenager, and all they remembered was how 'saucy' it was. And it is, there's quite a bit of literary sex, and philandering. I did really enjoy the writing, Updike's amazing use of language to describe places and people, but it's also a very dense book, sometimes so heavy going, so full to the brim with language, that I wanted to get to the end, and now I feel the need for som...
I came to this book purposefully, wanting to engage in mental conversation about couples in the suburbs of New England. I have very recently been reading other (similar) authors on the same subject: Fitzgerald (Tender is the Night, anyone?) Cheever, Yates (Revolutionary Road is a cousin, theme-wise). I’m not one to call these books “outdated” as some people have, as I usually find that 90% is universal and familiar in social behavior today. Couples, however, did feel dated because of the focus o...
What is it that Jack says to Ennis in Brokeback Mountain? “I wish I knew how to quit you?” I think that's it, and that's exactly what I want to say to John Updike. . . I wish I knew how to quit you.I wish I knew how to quit you, John, quit this relationship I've gotten myself into with you. There are no cliffhangers here, no outbursts of laughter or joy, just a whole lot of painful examinations of life and much unwanted talk of our impending deaths.So, why do I stay? Is it the sex?Mmmm, yes, it
Maybe I'm an idealist when it comes to matter of the heart, romantic idiom, love and marriage, so it is hard for me to grasp the reality that some people actually live(d) as described in this book. But with an entire novel (Couples) and a good part of at least two of the Rabbit books dedicated to the scenario of partner "swapping" and "swinging," and other forms of adultery (a.k.a. cheating), I am pushed to accept that not only does this behavior exist, but that author John Updike actually did i...
60's wife swapping in New England - hence rather confusing at first re who is married to who, who is having an affair with who, who children belong to etc. Wonderfully poignant and evocative metaphors and descriptive passages; other bits are deliberately disjointed, more like stream-of-consciousness.
This book reminded me of my mother; one she may have read with pink edged pages, copyright 1968, the price on the cover $1.25 (not even an ISBN number). I picked up this one for its reputation for sex - and I was not disappointed.But that's not why I gave it five stars. John Updike is a dazzling wordsmith. Everything from the imagery to the depth of his characters to the story line was top notch. I'd never read such a vivid representation of an asshole as I have with Piet Hanema. Of course, it w...