Magic always has a price — (Tag line from “Once Upon a Time” American TV fantasy/adventure 2011-2018)
I recently learned that “novel of adultery” was a genre unto itself, like “romance,” “horror,” or “fantasy” —terms that might well apply to adultery if we want to be controversial about it. Within the genre are the canonical novels Anna Karenina (Tolstoy), Madame Bovary (Flaubert), and Lady Chatterley’s Lover (D. H. Lawrence), in which adulterous acts and their consequences are central themes. There is adultery with consequences also in Vanity Fair (Thackeray) and The Age of Innocence (Wharton), but in the former, the real adultery takes place off-stage, and in the latter comes down to nothing more than a kiss. In the nineteenth century, adultery might be nothing more than a married woman (or man) entertaining (even merely walking and talking with) a member of the opposite sex who isn’t her (or his) spouse.
In our more enlightened times, we are allowed to say much more, and that brings us to Updike, who, in 2008, received a lifetime achievement award “celebrating crude, tasteless, or ridiculous sexual passages in modern literature” from Britain’s Bad Sex in Literature committee (Google). Published in 1968, “Couples” takes place in a fictional Boston suburb of Tarbox—a fictional Ipswich, according to Time Magazine—from roughly 1962 to 1965—events are slotted in (the 1963 JFK assassination, for example), orienting us to time’s passage.
There are ten couples, professionals—a pilot, a dentist, businessmen, scientists, home builders—somewhere between their mid-twenties and early thirties. Most have young children. These are ordinary middle-class American couples. One or another of them hosts parties almost every weekend. They play tennis, three-on-three basketball, golf, ski, and swim together (Tarbox is on the coast) in various combinations. The parties are alcohol fueled (none of these folks appear to be familiar with marijuana or cocaine). Everyone is usually drunk, even the pregnant woman in the group drinks and, like most of the others, smokes cigarettes—this is 1962.
The novel’s focus is Piet, a builder and husband of Angela, father of two girls, five and about seven years old when the story opens. Updike writes mostly in third-person omniscient, but Piet (and in but one scene, Angela) is the only mind he gets into. The sexual dynamics evolve between the couples, with Piet as the dominant male. With one exception, the only sex narrated (whether in present or past tense) belongs to Piet, who ends up sleeping with five of the women (six counting his wife), three only a few times, two (besides his wife) repeatedly. The exception is a scene late in the novel between Angela and one of the other husbands. All the other sex is communicated through whispered conversations, looks, and behavior observed among the characters. Sometimes what is rumored is not the case (as in real life), but their intuitions are more often accurate.
The group is not a swap club. The affairs are supposed to be secret, but it is impossible to keep such secrets for long among that many drunken people. Shenanigans multiply. Two of the couples begin knowingly swapping partners. One of Piet’s lovers gets pregnant—a big problem in 1963. At least two of the women are bisexual. Jealosies and recriminations erupt. The result, eventually, is the group’s dissolution, Piet’s (and a few others’) divorce, and so on.
Updike writes in the style of 19th-century realists like Flaubert. The novel is 650 pages long. I think easily three hundred and fifty of that are lengthy narrations of scene, dress, homes, decorative tastes, smells, sounds, events (the aforementioned sports), the kids, and so on. Every description comes salted with at least one, and usually more than one, metaphor. Early in the novel, these diversions help to build rounded characters. Later on, they are the “realist fluff.”
The book delivers a good lesson about affairs Updike may not have consciously intended. Where the illicit sex is unencumbered by emotional involvement—other than friendship—the sex has little consequence (not everyone ends up divorcing, and of those who do, most are happier after the fact). Piet, and the women involved, mostly have a good time—read orgasms, though their occurrences are only sometimes noted. But when the sex is encumbered by more serious emotional involvement, there are more serious consequences—even for the sex. One woman never (until a last scene with her near the end of the novel) has an orgasm and yet desperately wants Piet to make love to her whenever it seems to be convenient. Is Piet a bad lover? No. Piet clearly knows his way around a woman’s sex. The problem is all hers. These two, the most “in love,” get into the worst trouble! The lesson: if you’re going to have extra marital sex because your spouse is not delivering in bed, have it for the sake of “good sex” (woman has as many orgasms as she wants and only then does man get his turn) and do not fall in love with your lover.
Is Updike’s realism very real? His characters are varied in psychology and circumstances as real human beings are wont to be. The setting (New England, USA, in the early 1960s) feels pretty real (I am only ten years behind Updike’s characters. I remember the early sixties in suburban New York as a young teenager. My parents had parties!). The “fiction,” if you will, is in the concentration of affairs among this insulated group—albeit always alcohol soused—of ten couples. We hear of no affairs outside the ten but one, late in the novel, when the pilot brags (a second-hand report) of having sex with women at distant ends of international flights. Another good rule for affairs is to have them with people outside your social circle!
How does Updike’s realism work for the sex? Why the bad sex writing award? Rather than use literal words or conventional metaphors to describe sex objects and actions, Updike extends the technique of excessive metaphorical description to sex: “He thrust upwards, seeking the light.” The upshot is that the metaphors, overly sentimental, cloying, and self-conscious in the service of “scene setting” or “character rounding” realism, become corny in the service of sex. The last thing Updike wants to write is conventional porn, so he casts about for metaphors that aren’t conventional, but remain unambiguous in their context. If his novel, like many generic romances, had one sex scene, he would, I am sure, have been forgiven. But the novel has a half-dozen long sex scenes and a greater number of shorter ones, all cast in unconventional—and corny—metaphors. I believe that is the reason for the award.
Truth be told, it is difficult to write explicit sex without being corny unless the telling is flat. Fifty Shades of Grey, despite critical opprobrium, manages it by being direct without embellishment. Anais Nin (Henry and June) avoids corniness with flat telling and a refusal to repeat herself across numerous sex scenes, often told after the fact. John Cleland (Memoirs of a Woman of Pleasure, the first English pornographic masterpiece) uses flat reporting and varies the level of description throughout.
Needing explicitness—adultery is the point of the novel—but eschewing directness—it would clash with the metaphor-laden realism of the rest—Updike sedulously abjures the obvious metaphors and finds others (many others) that are corny because they are so obviously meant to serve explicitness without being obvious. Overt metaphors—turgid tuber, rigid pole, cloying cavern, volcanic orifice—are always corny because they are obvious. There is no irony in them. Updike’s metaphors are rich with literary irony. He was not happy with his award.
Ruminations 