Couples - John Updike

Couples is the book that has been assailed for its complete frankness and praised as an artful, seductive, savagely graphic portrait of love, marriage and adultery in America. But be it damned or hailed Couples drew back the curtain forever on sex in suburbia in the late 20th century. A classic, it is one of those books that will be read--and remembered--for a long time to come.

nTrapped in their cozy catacombs, the couples have made sex by turns their toy, their glue, their trauma, their therapy, their hope, their frustration, their revenge, their narcotic, their main line of communication and their sole and pitiable shield against the awareness of death.--Time nOne of the signature novels of the American 1960s, Couples is a book that, when it debuted, scandalized the public with prose pictures of the way people live, and that today provides an engrossing epitaph to the short, happy life of the post-Pill paradise. It chronicles the interactions of ten young married couples in a seaside New England community who make a cult of sex and of themselves. The group of acquaintances form a magical circle, complete with ritualistic games, religious substitutions, a priest (Freddy Thorne), and a scapegoat (Piet Hanema).

As with most American utopias, this one's existence is brief and unsustainable, but the imaginative quest that inspires its creation is eternal. n nPraise for Couples n nCouples [is] John Updike's tour de force of extramarital wanderlust.--The New York Times Book Review n nIngenious . .

. If this is a dirty book, I don't see how sex can be written about at all.--Wilfrid Sheed, The New York Times Book Reviewn