Customer Reviews
welcome to the post-pill paradise - By: Nina-Jo Rees, 09 Aug 2008 
The novel is set in a promiscuous, heavy drinking & well-off circle of young married friends in the fictional sea-side Boston suburb of Tarbox. The novel takes place in 1963 around the time of the assassination of JFK.
Welcome to the post-pill paradise....
These ironic words occur many times in Couples & give a clue to the central theme of the book. How do these young, mostly highly educated & well-to-do thirty something couples, deal with the opportunities that risk-free contraception & a new more open attitude to sex offer for the first time in America. They have wealth, time, opportunity & the desire to experiment. Do they, the novel asks, find themselves in paradise or a kind of hell in which alll previous moral absolutes have gone ?
The 8 or 9 couples live close-knit lives, sharing holidays, parties, school runs & frequently, sexual partners. Their master of ceremonies, the odious dentist Freddie, encourages this sexual freedom in which he takes virtuallly no part. Piet Hanema, the central male character, is an inveterate womaniser & interestingly, the only non-academic in the group, he is a carpenter. He also remains friends with alll his previous partners as he is attractive & undemanding. His transgressive relationship with the heavily pregnant Foxy Whitworth causes deep rifts & disquiet in the group. Hedonistic freedom comes, Updike makes it clear, with a heavy price & Piet & Foxy pay.
The writing is wonderful. Updike at his clear, passionate & insightful best leads us deep into the lives of his characters through his way of writing from the inside out. We feel, see & experience life as lived by those characters in that time & place.
Describing his subject as "the American smalll town, Protestant middle class," Updike has become most famous as a "chronicler of suburban adultery". A subject which, he once wrote, "if I have not exhausted, has exhausted me." There is no sign of exhaustion in this early novel though, He writes honestly, with fire in his belly & out of anger, deep disgust as well as a desire to explain & to understand.
