I couldn't even finish this book, and I really made a considerable effort.

As I delved deeper into the story, these couples gradually became truly insufferable. After a certain period, it seemed that everyone was cheating on one another, and yet they did absolutely nothing to transform their lives into what they desired.

It was just a collection of miserable individuals who complained incessantly and longed after one another. Reading through it felt like a real slog, a tiresome and arduous task.

I found myself constantly struggling to maintain my interest, but unfortunately, it just wasn't enough to keep me engaged until the end.

The whole narrative seemed to lack any real purpose or direction, leaving me feeling rather disappointed and frustrated.

I'm not sure if it was the writing style or the storyline itself that failed to resonate with me, but either way, this book was definitely not a pleasant read for me.

Perhaps others might have a different perspective, but for me, it was a definite miss.

Updike is most definitely in the canon of American contemporary fiction writers. Alongside Philip Roth, J.D. Salinger, Harper Lee, Thomas Pynchon, and Saul Bellow, he is a prominent figure. He is perhaps best known for the ‘Rabbit’ series, which made his name. However, it was ‘Couples’, published in 1968, that got his picture on the front of Time magazine and established him in the ‘celeb’ top drawer.

It is odd that Updike seems to divide readers, with many, particularly women, being reticent or even refusing to read his work. This could be due to his male stance and viewpoint in most of his books, his avowed position as a white, upper-middle-class male, or his identification with the ‘liberal’ and privileged world.

‘Couples’ is a period piece set in 1963. Updike takes care to establish the time, citing events such as the UN involvement in Katanga, the Great Train Robbery, and the assassination of John F. Kennedy. The book reflects the social and cultural changes of the time, including the growth of capitalism, the questioning of formal religious worship, and the beginning of the breakup of the nuclear family.

The novel explores the lives of a group of affluent couples in Tarbox, a south Boston commuter-belt suburb. The men are professionals, and the women have fulfilled their role within marriage. However, they are bored and seek excitement through hedonistic pursuits, including extra-marital affairs. The characters are complex and flawed, and Updike uses their relationships to examine themes such as love, marriage, and morality.

The affair between Piet Hanema and Roxy Whitman is a central plot point. Roxy is married to Ken, a research biologist, and is pregnant with their first child. Piet is a carpenter and a serial adulterer. Their affair is driven by boredom and a desire for excitement, but it also leads to deeper questions about the nature of marriage and the role of religion in society.

The novel is influenced by Freudian analysis, and the characters often examine their motives and emotions through this lens. They experience guilt and seek ways to deal with it, with some turning to psychoanalysis. The age of ennui is a recurring theme, and the characters struggle to find meaning in their lives.

The final chapter of the book sees the ‘scene’ in Tarbox break up. The new set becomes the old set and is superseded. The characters face the consequences of their actions, and some find ways to move forward in the new age. Updike’s conclusion may leave some readers underwhelmed, but the book is a superb evocation of a particular time and place. It raises many issues and is a classic of American literature that should be read.

Against my better intentions, I truly liked this book. Released in 1968, it was controversial at the time, and that was well-deserved.

It tells the story of a group of young couples in Tarbox, Massachusetts, who, in the early sixties, have all found each other and engage in a constant social stir.

The book is quite risqué, almost vulgar in many places in its description of sex. Beyond that, the writing about sex is simply atrocious. Some of it is the worst you'll ever read. Maybe Updike had to cover it in this gushing floss of presupposed beautiful words to make it acceptable to his publisher.

There are a couple of grisly examples. "Piet’s hands, feet, head, and genitals were those of a larger man, as if his creator, seeing that the cooling body had been left too small, had injected a final surge of plasma which at these extremities had ponderously clotted." And worse, "Georgene drew herself from his arms and stretched out again on the blanket. Giving the sun his turn: whore. The reflecting foil decorated her face with parabolic dabs and nebulae and spurts: solar jism." And worst of all, "The woman’s beauty caressed the skin of his eyes; his shaggy head sank toward the ancient alleyway where, foul proud queen, she frothed most."

This is horrific, like a dirty Victorian novel imagined by a precocious eighth grader. But yet, as awful as this is, and there are many more examples, the story Updike tells here is very interesting.

Somehow, in the early sixties, during the Kennedy years, in this small Massachusetts town, long before the social and sexual revolutions that were soon to come, this group of couples, ten to sixteen heads of young families, had taken to swinging. It wasn't a key party; nothing was coordinated between couples, at least not originally. However, over and over, organic adultery forms between various husbands and wives.

While we see it all, and frankly, you really do need a scorecard to remember who has slept with whom, our main character is Piet Hanema. Piet is well liked in the group. He might be a bit below the Boston finance men or the local dentist in his profession as he is the lesser partner in a local building company, but, dirty rattling truck or not, he seems to be irresistible to the wives. Keeping company at various times with two, along with his wife, his life is not troubled. He loves his wife (it's just sex) and daughters. When a new couple moves into town, Ken and Foxy, and he is hired to redo their cottage on the ocean marsh, he falls into a relationship with the younger wife. Foxy is many of the things the local women are not, and she is also pregnant.

When one considers how seriously risqué that must have been, a sweepingly, increasingly pregnant woman engaging in a continual affair, Updike must have taken some hits.

As Foxy and his relationship is eventually discovered and the other couples deal with the end result of their adulteries, we do see that the party cannot go on forever.

But by the end, even as many of these characters are vibrantly unlikable, you still do care about them.

Lastly, a couple of interesting points. One of the wives, a Jewish woman, makes a complaint about there being no acknowledgment of Hanukkah while the Christmas pageant at school is celebrated. Piet responds, "Yeah, and why not make the kids celebrate Ramadan by not eating their box lunches." For a 1968 book about the early sixties, the author had a good vision of the coming culture wars.

Also, as the couples come together to mourn the assassinated President Kennedy, one of the husbands, a history buff, goes into a long monologue about "Four Presidents, plus the attempts on Truman and both Roosevelt’s, Teddy was actually wounded in his unsuccessful campaign in 1912 - not to mention Huey Long. (Of course we could mention many more since this book was written.) There isn't a country west of the Balkans with any kind of the same record. The Prime Ministers of England go everywhere with a single bodyguard." One of the other husbands responds, "We fought for the right to bear arms." Indeed we did, with results we still feel every day.

This, if one can put blinders on to the nuts and bolts of the sexual scenes, is a very strong book.

It's almost as if one is watching a grown-up version of "Gossip Girl," but this time, it's all fueled by a mid-life crisis.

John Updike seems to have assumed that being explicit for the sake of being explicit is an admirable trait. However, that couldn't be further from the truth.

Merely being explicit does not guarantee an interesting read. In fact, it often detracts from the overall quality of the story.

In this work, it's extremely hard to keep track of who's sleeping with whom. The characters lack depth and seem to be nothing more than carbon copies of each other.

There's no real individuality or complexity to them, making it difficult for the reader to form any kind of emotional connection.

As a result, the story feels flat and unengaging, despite its attempts to be titillating and shocking.

It's a prime example of how style can sometimes overshadow substance, leaving the reader with a sense of dissatisfaction and disappointment.

Updike is not an easy author, one of those who capture from the very first pages. Beyond any speculation about good, less good, dated translations and so on, he remains one of those writers capable of disorienting the reader with his images and the construction of syntax, a marathon runner rather than a sprinter.

This novel doesn't grip immediately; it takes a bit of time to immerse oneself in the incredibly poisoned atmosphere of Tarbox, yet another rendition of the provincial northeastern American town where lazy parties, bed stories with dangerous intersections, dialogues with a high Freudian content, and a touch of politics, friendships as sharp as razors, alternate serially. I have already noticed how sex in North American narrative is often tremendously mortifying, a thermometer of physical decadence, a tool for hitting, a cold habit; here Updike steps on the accelerator and gifts us a formally erotic novel that leaves a residue of extreme bitterness, in which the relationships between pairs of old friends are literally disintegrated by sex. In the background, the roaring sixties, in which the most traumatic event in the political history of 20th-century America, the assassination of JFK, also takes up a significant space. An autumnal ending with a moral washing, perhaps unexpected for such a deeply cynical and misanthropic reading.

These days, "Couples" is mostly interesting for revealing the atmosphere of the time and the manners of the period it takes place in.

"Thou shalt not commit adultery" – Exodus 20:14. However, in a small town, the days are empty, and everyone needs something to fill the void in their day-to-day living. As a result, adultery becomes practically the only entertainment, and the transgression of this commandment is no longer seen as a sin but as bliss.

She seemed to float on her bed at a level of bliss little altered by his coming and going, thus presenting a challenge to him. At last, she confessed that he was hurting her and curled one finger around the back of his ear to thank him. She was his smallest woman, his most passive, and his most remote, in these mournful throes, from speech or any question.

But walking on the thin ice of vice slowly makes the lives of all the participants more and more muddled.

Wasn't this commandment created specially to tempt? It makes one wonder if the very existence of such a rule is what lures people into the forbidden act. As the story unfolds, we see how the characters' actions have consequences that ripple through their lives and relationships, leading to a web of confusion and turmoil.

I had to give up reading at page 110. The prose was overly elaborate and convoluted, making it a real struggle to get through.

Moreover, the story itself was dreadfully dull. It might have been considered scandalous when it was first published, but that aspect didn't hold any appeal for me.

I simply couldn't connect with the author's writing style. It's possible that other readers will find great enjoyment in it, but unfortunately, it just wasn't to my taste.

Every attempt I made to engage with the text felt like a chore, and I eventually had to admit defeat.

Maybe I'm missing something, but for now, this book will remain unfinished on my shelf.

It was truly a surprise, and even a shock, to dislike this book so intensely after having thoroughly enjoyed the Rabbit quartet. Admittedly, it was relatively early Updike, written in 1968, after the first Rabbit. However, the major problem is evident even in the flyleaf blurb. It's a story about ten, yes, ten New England couples!

Who can possibly keep track of who is who and who is married to whom in such a crowded cast of characters, equivalent to two basketball teams!

Of course, we can't. They simply aren't distinctive enough or carefully enough delineated. Even though one couple is Jewish and another Asian, it doesn't make much difference. The problem isn't just that they aren't very interesting; it's that they aren't very appealing either.

The chief focus, perhaps as close as we get to Updike's alter ego since he is also of Dutch descent, is an obnoxious philanderer named Piet. And what a character he is! He has adulterous affairs with at least three (maybe four, I lost count) of the local wives in the small coastal town of Tarbox. He even physically abuses one of them, hitting her in the face while in the so-called throes of passion.

So, what is so appealing about this jerk? What makes him such a womanizer? We never really find out. He just comes across as a slave to his libido, a church-going slave at that. The scenes of tenderness with his family don't really redeem him, and he seems like the kind of guy you'd go out of your way to avoid in real life and perhaps wish you didn't have to read about in fiction.

Stories about people who are slaves to their genitalia can be very engaging, as seen in Philip Roth's works. But the further problem here is, of course, the prose. Updike is also a published poet, and the language is so noticeably overworked that you sometimes have to read a sentence two or three times to understand what he's trying to say. For example, "Piet lay as a shimmering upon an unfounded mineral imperviousness." What on earth does that mean? It's like wading waist-deep through Jello. My verdict would be that it's a young novelist showing off his immense talent a little too self-consciously.

I greatly admire Updike, especially his later fiction, essays, and criticism. I'll continue to read him. But this book was a chore, and it left a distinctly unpleasant taste in this reader's mouth.

SEX SEX SEX, and suburbia

Suburbia is often associated with a quiet and peaceful lifestyle, but beneath the surface, there may be more to it than meets the eye. The topic of sex in suburbia is a complex and often overlooked one. In this seemingly idyllic setting, people may have their own desires, secrets, and experiences related to sex.

Some may assume that the conservative and traditional values often associated with suburbia would lead to a more subdued attitude towards sex. However, this is not always the case. In fact, suburbia can be a breeding ground for sexual experimentation and exploration.

There are many factors that can contribute to the prevalence of sex in suburbia. For example, the privacy and anonymity that comes with living in a detached home can provide a sense of freedom and security for people to engage in sexual activities. Additionally, the close-knit community and social networks in suburbia can also lead to increased opportunities for sexual encounters.

It is important to note that while sex in suburbia may be a reality, it is also a topic that should be discussed and understood in a respectful and responsible manner. By acknowledging and addressing the issue, we can gain a better understanding of the complex and diverse nature of human sexuality in all aspects of life, including suburbia.

Good grief - a total slog.

This book is truly a laborious read. It seems to have not aged well at all. From the very beginning, it fails to engage the reader and instead feels like a tiresome chore. The writing style is outdated and lacks the charm and freshness that would make it appealing in today's literary landscape. The story itself may have had potential once upon a time, but now it comes across as平淡无奇 and uninteresting. It's a disappointment to see a book that was perhaps once well-regarded has now become so lackluster. It serves as a reminder that not all books stand the test of time, and this one is a prime example of that.

It's a pity that this book has fallen into such a state, as it could have offered so much more if it had been updated or rewritten to suit modern tastes. As it is, it's a book that is best left on the shelf, gathering dust and forgotten.

"Двойки" is a book about the lost morality, the lack of love, and the search for it. In a place where cynicism is expected, it is also very comforting.

I wouldn't dare to read anything by Updike soon as his style didn't appeal to me, at least in this book.

The story in "Двойки" seems to unfold in a world that is both familiar and yet somewhat alien. It delves into the complex emotions and relationships of the characters, exploring the depths of their moral dilemmas.

The author's writing, while perhaps not to everyone's taste, has a certain charm. It manages to capture the essence of the human condition, the struggle between good and evil, love and hate.

Overall, "Двойки" is a thought-provoking book that makes the reader question their own values and beliefs. It may not be a light read, but it is one that is sure to leave a lasting impression.

This book is thoroughly depressing.

Recently, I just finished reading A Farewell to Arms, which was also extremely depressing. However, Couples is a completely different kind of depressing. You simply can't believe how depraved these people are. As someone who is often called a hopeless romantic, it's shocking to see some of the things these married couples will do. (Perhaps it's a sad wake-up call?)

Of course, it goes without saying that John Updike once again proves himself to be a gifted writer. He has the ability to string together words and sentences in a way that I believe is unmatched. It's so ironic that these poetic and beautiful sentences are used to describe such awful people. The book also has its fair share of profound symbolism, especially centered around religion. The characters in Couples have found a way to kill God and suffer in their attempts to replace him. It's interesting because Updike has said before that the setting for most of his writing is "American small town, Protestant middle class."

For me, Couples was like an interesting case study. I felt disgusted with these people, yet also intrigued and eager to know more. As the reader, you're like a newcomer to Tarbox, feeling lost when trying to match names with people, especially in the first hundred pages of the book. But as you discover more and more gossip about who's been up to what with whom, you find yourself just as entangled and a part of the mess as the characters. The book is challenging, shocking, beautiful, tragic, and completely debauched.