Novels 1968-1975: Couples / Rabbit Redux / A Month of Sundays

by John Updike, Christopher Carduff (Editor)

This second volume in the Library of America edition of John Updike’s novels collects three unforgettable books from the late 1960s and the 70s that capture the turmoil of an America undergoing heady social change on several fronts at once—sexual, social, and moral. Always a master of meticulous observation and subtle characterization, Updike turned in this period to a wider social canvas and in so doing reached new heights of critical and commercial success, including an appearance on the cover of Time magazine.

When Couples was published in 1968 it achieved instant notoriety because of its candor about the sexual revolution, then in full swing. (The Los Angeles Times called it “America’s Most Explicitly Sexual Novel Ever.”) Shocking, entertaining, and searingly honest about human passions and their costs, Updike’s saga of the “post-Pill paradise” of the Kennedy era details the rampant, jubilant, and inevitably complicated episodes of promiscuity among a tight-knit social set in the placid, respectable town of Tarbox, an hour north of Boston. Often compared with the era’s other landmark American novels about sex, Philip Roth’s Portnoy’s Complaint and Erica Jong’s Fear of Flying, it remains a scorching good read.

The second installment in the Rabbit series, Rabbit Redux (1971), finds Updike’s signature protagonist, Harry Angstrom, caught up in a whirlwind of personal tumult that mirrors—and illuminates—the upheaval of the late 60s. When his wife leaves him, Harry, now thirty-six, opens his home to Jill, a drug-addicted teenager, and her companion, Skeeter, a black Vietnam veteran and radical. Abandoning the drab rhythms and narrow conformity of his past life, Harry must confront how “we were all brought up to want things and maybe the world isn’t big enough for all that wanting.”

In A Month of Sundays (1975), a short tale of one man’s disgrace, resonant with the concurrent unraveling of the Nixon presidency, Updike engages with Hawthorne’s The Scarlet Letter in ways playful and profound. Pastor Thomas Marshfield is banished to a desert retreat after his serial adulteries have become too much for his church to tolerate. Charged by the estimable Ms. Prynne with recording his life in a diary, Marshfield offers himself to the reader as “a Christian minister, and an American” who lays bare his soul with a mixture of irony, celebration, and self-justification.

Rounding out the volume are two short pieces that shed light on the novels as well as “Couples: A Short Story,” the origin of the novel of the same name, written in 1963 but deemed unsuitable for publication by The New Yorker.

Genres: Fiction

1150 pages, Hardcover

Published January 7, 2020

About the author

John Hoyer Updike was an American writer. Updike's most famous work is his Rabbit series (Rabbit, Run; Rabbit Redux; Rabbit Is Rich; Rabbit At Rest; and Rabbit Remembered). Rabbit is Rich and Rabbit at Rest both won Pulitzer Prizes for Updike. Describing his subject as "the American small town, Protestant middle class," Updike is well known for his careful craftsmanship and prolific writing, having published 22 novels and more than a dozen short story collections as well as poetry, literary criticism and children's books. Hundreds of his stories, reviews, and poems have appeared in The New Yorker since the 1950s. His works often explore sex, faith, and death, and their inter-relationships.

He died of lung cancer at age 76.

Reviews

[Tim O'Leary · Rating 3 out of 5]

"The Adulterous Society" was a banner attributed to John Updike's portrait on a Time Magazine cover (April 26, 1968) shortly after his status quo-breaking, suburbanized version of porn "Couples" came out. It beat "Portnoy's Complaint" to the NYT Best Sellers List by a year as a genre that dispensed with the plain brown wrapper of such illicit behavior between married couples making swapping socially, if not recreationally, acceptable. Set in the Kennedy years, the reader is supposed to be shocked by the graphic blandishments of promiscuity played out by Updike to the hilt in a small town called Tarbox north of Boston. Topical footnotes in the story like the demise of "Thresher" may reawaken the period for Boomers, like myself, who were coming of age. Which similarly places the principal characters in the limbo (lost) generation of being too young to have served in World War II, and too old to associate with Boomers who--to borrow an analogy from "Bookforum"--would forsake the alcoholic's preferred go-to poison of gin at deadly cocktail parties for the long-haired liberation of outdoor concerts on LSD. Liberation was a key driver for this book's surfacing to fame in its time, but in critical retrospect it is neither liberating, nor do its conceits measure up to literary relevance of historic merit. While Updike's risque prose may have been titilating to his newly-anointed followers, those days of "The Pill" trading the novelty of sexual freedom for lost innocence--thanks also to mainstream upheaval by Updike's contemporaries like Mailer and Roth--are long since behind us when our parents would hide such adult-themed books from us kids. The effect, rather than indulging Updike's racier instincts, then, is to take his copulations as merely tiring, repetitive, monotonous-if-not-monogamous physical acts--a routine devoid of narrative between partners trapped in their lifestyle of boredom and isolation. And it's all so damned smug. That upper-crust, Ivy League posturing, so much in the literary fashion of those times, is nothing but wholesale pretense. Think pearls. Better still, think pearl onions in Bombay martinis set to stilted, droning, dinner and/or impromptu cocktail party conversations infused with one-upmanship, arrogant affected banter, gossip; sly grins behind insinuating inflections; the knowing, sideways glances through bloodshot eyes; the casual bump and touch and gesture of body English...where a flirtatious nudge is as good as a wink. Think scorecards and failed expectations. Think insufferable, pompous bores. That being said, confess I remain an ardent fan of everything Rabbit Angstrom and Updike. But his crowd, here, is not one I care to hang with further. 450 pages? No way. 150 and done. You win some. You lose some. And never mind the sexy bits...some you don't even go more than half-way. Three stars, not for a confusing story of 10 couples' convoluted copulative clubbishness, but for a double Pulitzer Prize-winning writing style not to be found anywhere else.

[Martin Bihl · Rating 3 out of 5]

A Month of Sundays - finished 06.05023