Tag: reading

The Novel of Adultery: An Analysis of John Updike’s Couples.

Magic always has a price — (Tag line from “Once Upon a Time” American TV fantasy/adventure 2011-2018)

Couples by John Updike, 1968

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.

Review: Brave New World by Aldous Huxley

Published in 1933, I do not seriously presume to review this classic. I will briefly summarize salient themes and relate some of what Huxley says to my novels. Full disclosure: such a review and linking as this is purely for fun. My novels are not in the same league as Huxley’s. I make no claim to profundity.

WARNING! SPOILER ALERT

I begin at the end because the connection to my work is at the beginning. The “savage” commits suicide because, among other things, he cannot reconcile his [perfectly normal] youthful lust for an attractive young woman—who makes plain her desire for him—and his austere upbringing outside the brave new world. His mother, who came from the new world but became trapped in the savage land when she was pregnant (by a new-worlder), craves a return to the new world. When she finally returns with her son (now a young man), she cannot handle the culture shock compounded by the social opprobrium of new world denizens for her having gotten—and looking—old. She also kills herself, albeit more slowly. In the new world, both she and her son are freaks.

In Huxley’s new world, nobody is ever [supposed to be] unhappy, and the powers that be achieve this in three ways: 

First, individuals are literally bred and conditioned through their childhood to fulfill specific social and industrial roles. One often hears the adage: “Love what you do, and you will never work a day in your life.” In the new world, people are made to love what they are born to do. 

Second, drugs, Soma, the fictional drug of the new world that provides temporary ecstasy and escape from the real world, is not, apparently, harmful over the long term unless taken too often and without some recovery time—this is how the savage’s mother kills herself. Everybody has access to this drug.

The third way is sex. There is no stigma to casual sex in the new world; indeed, all sex is casual. No one marries, and women are not supposed to have babies—Literal bottles make babies (remember this published in 1933). To be sure, sex is consensual on both sides. Men and women can invite sex, and either party can refuse or accept invitations.

There are a few things to note about the sex. Power plays are going on. Handsome men and beautiful women are, of course, favored, but there is also a dynamic in which more powerful men, higher up the management hierarchy, have an advantage when inviting women to bed. Lower-order women often accept invitations from such men because the men are in a position to help them along a [limited] career path or give gifts. But as one might expect, such sex does not always make the woman happy. Lenine takes Soma to get past the sex when she sleeps with her supervisor-lover.

As an aside, Huxley here exhibits some chauvinism. Even in Huxley’s new world, the women are responsible for preventing pregnancy. Why? Surely, vasectomies were available in Huxley’s day? Why weren’t all male children vasectomized, or for that matter, why not alter the invitro gestations so that everyone—or at least all of one sex—is born sterile? The story precluded such a solution. At least one woman, the mother of the savage, had to become pregnant.

Before getting to the connection to my work, I note a few things about Huxley’s vision. He was wrong about the future of flying cars, but he predicted our present throwaway culture in which old things are easily discarded and exchanged for new things. To some extent, this was—for Huxley—a cultural phenomenon as it is for us. Also, like us, on the macro-economic level, the steady acquisition of new items keeps the wheels of industry and the economy working. 

Huxley’s insight is built into Capitalism as we have it. He did not invent this idea (it goes back to Marx and Engles), and his new world elides the ecological and climatological problems occasioned by our conspicuous consumption—problems already, albeit tentatively, appreciated by the scientists of the 1930s. He correctly predicted that conspicuous consumption would grow way beyond what was already manifest in his time.

I now return to the connection between Brave New World and my novels, a connection that runs through sex.

There are sex-related geopolitical implications in all of my novels. In the first novel, Foreign Agent, the Chinese plan to disrupt American social and political life by introducing genetically modified men and women who can deliver much more powerful peak sexual experiences than ordinary humans. In the second novel, Foreign Agent the Last Chapter, space aliens propose to pacify humanity’s militant inclinations with more and better sex than anyone—well, few anyway—is presently having. In Cult of Aten, novel number three, worldwide good sex precipitates international chaos because in many [actual] countries, sex, other than the minimum required to produce tax-paying citizens from a marriage explicitly sanctioned by the State, is literally illegal! In Indonesia, sex outside the bounds of a conventional marriage is a capital crime! In novel number four, LoveMe Inc., we discover that radically conservative women are conservative because they aren’t having sufficient—or any—orgasms! 

In Brave New World, Huxley illustrates his new world’s failure to deliver endless happiness through a sexual union made, on the woman’s part, from habit, not desire—like much sex in the real world. Huxley’s mistake was failing to distinguish sex from good sex, especially for women. Like accidental pregnancy, this is a plot demand for Huxley. It does not burden my stories.

Does this mean I believe that good sex alone is the solution to the world’s strife? Of course not! My novels are ridiculous, clumsy satires, while Huxley’s, if not a masterpiece, has demonstrated staying power in the canon of English socio-political satire. But if good sex alone was not sufficient to cure the world’s ills, it would, I believe, make some difference. People would be happier, and happier people are more tolerant of others’ differences. No novel, however masterful, addresses everything required for human happiness, let alone global peace and prosperity. All art is an interpretation, some more faithful to perceived reality than others.

Brave New World is not faithful to reality except in its anticipation of conspicuous consumerism, cross-cultural psycho-social shock, and bigotry—the last two the ultimate themes of the story. Like Huxley, my novels are socio-political satires, but the first three anticipate nothing. The fourth novel does make use of a real phenomenon. Orgasms activate brain centers related to tolerance and compassion—The novel cites actual research. But I leverage this objective observation to absurd levels. In my hands, it is not a prescient theme but a plot point. 

Huxley’s themes speak to real life. His satire is filled with irony, pathos, poignancy, loneliness, and false happiness. He is not, however, funny. Huxley’s world is ridiculous and physically impossible, but it serves as a stage for human social and psychological reality. The political nature of my satire is unmistakable, but my world is ridiculous not because of any physical impossibility but rather its psycho-social absurdity. Orgasms do not, alas, turn Republican women into Democrats! Would that it be so! Huxley’s characters react realistically to their world. My characters react unrealistically to our world. But for this reason, and unlike Huxley, my novels are funny!