There goes the neighborhood

My biggest fan, and harshest critic, told me this morning that my most recent post was unsatisfactory. She also doubted my intimacy with the material; she told me that the audience can tell when I’m bluffing and not speaking from a point of authority. This conversation gave me pause. But once the pause was over and I thought once again I thought of intimacy. Couples is full of intimate moments, and the idea and practice is a central theme of the story.

To begin, I do not think that Updike, for all his wordiness and ability, truly can write an intimate scene. Unlike Philip Roth, and another of my favorites Joseph Heller, Updike’s sex scenes are lacking in the truly descriptive and frankly raunchy adjectives that readers of the genre are looking for. When Piet takes Foxy to bed, readers want to know more than Updike can deliver on. We want to feel their extramarital passion, see the depths of her desire in her eyes. We want Foxy, though she is pregnant and bloated, to seem as sexy and desirable as Piet sees her. Make her into the object of lust and wanton desire to the reader that the characters see her as. Updike sets out to write a sexy novel, but falls short in the sexy parts. This subject of promiscuity and extramarital affairs seems as foreign to Updike as open heart surgery would be to a dentist. While Updike is a great writer, and the dentist may be an expert at his profession, the subjects of sex and cardiology are foreign to these men in this extended metaphor. Similarly, you would never ask a Methodist minister to direct a skin flick, so one must ask: why did Updike undertake the effort?

John Updike saw around him a loss in spirituality. In America he saw people turning from the more established churches and thumbing their noses at the Congregational and Episcopal churches. The old orthodoxy of Catholicism was too harsh and what remains of the great Protestant churches doing less protesting and more pandering, these facts led to smaller congregations and fewer followers seeking the truth. Longing for the Puritan tradition that started the New World, and all of the societal connections that came with it, these people turned to empty sex to solve their problems. Piet Hanema is one of these people. A man of the Earth, a builder of houses and driver of a green Chevrolet truck, he is lost spiritually. In his home of Michigan, surrounded by his Dutch family and his Dutch Reformed faith, Piet had a clearer sense of self. He was the son of a gardener and a schoolboy. However, moving to Massachusetts and working with the horse-trader Matt Gallagher has made him a lost soul. He attends a Congregational church more concerned about his weekly tithe than his spiritual wealth and as a result he begins affairs with three different women outside of his marriage. Georgene Thorne, Bea Guerin and Foxy Whitman all separately find their way into his grasp. However, it takes two to tango. Not all of the fault lies with Piet.

In the fictional seaside town of Tarbox, there is this social group of ten couples who would have considered themselves in the old Puritan days an “elect”, chosen by God to intermingle with each other. Not finding solace and sexual excitement with their respective spouses they turn instead to other members of the social group to get their jollies. Why? How can there be so much sexual frustration and it be so large to encompass twenty people? Why did no one, especially the Jewish couple (Saltz) or the Catholics (Constantines) see that what they’re doing is against their respect doctrines? Because they have turned against the dogma and formed their own religion; this is where they replace God and Jesus with coitus and orgasms. Updike posits that the sexual revolution began not on a college campus and not in the great metropolitan centers like New York or Los Angeles. But that the great, glorious revolution began here: in a suburban Massachusetts town with a few couples that outwardly seemed well to do and mentally adjusted. Look at the professions of the men: general contractor, airline pilot, biologist, computer engineer, dentist, etc. And look at the women, all had borne children into this world and some were teachers and members of local government. These are not what you would categorize as “swingers”, these are the “normal” people. They drive nice cars and live in nice houses and are supposed to have nice, polite, unbecoming sex with their spouses. Never would the casual observer see these people as sexual deviants or miscreants. But instead this is the perfect cover, by being higher class and respectable people they formed a great camouflage for their deviant acts.

However deviant his characters are, Updike still misses the true coup de grace. He could have made Couples one of the greatest novels of all time by including more intimate details of the lovemaking. Sex sells in advertisement and in novels. Rabbit could be but a footnote on his greatness if Updike had made his characters intimate. Make Piet desire these women not only because his wife is cold and distant, but because he is a healthy man and has healthy desires. I am not a fan of extramarital affairs, but if Angela won’t give Piet enough sugar, help the reader understand why he does what he does. Piet works as a contractor, and wants to return home the glorious breadwinner, snatching survival from the jaws of a cruel world. However, in seeking gratification he is snubbed by his capricious Angela. As a result, he takes his burning libido and manliness into strange beds. Updike needed to do more to show the dysfunction in the marriages and what drove his characters to sleeping around. Tell us and show us why Angela Hanema is cold in the sack and why Bea, Foxy and Georgene are so inviting to Piet. But too, tell me what has gone wrong in the women’s lives that drove them to Piet. Finally, make the sex sexier. I don’t want vague adjectives. This is one instance of “tell me, don’t show me.” Updike is too foreign to the sex scenes for a man who was married twice and fathered children.

I have enjoyed Couples but find Updike too polite in bed. He clearly was not a man enthralled or interested in sex and affairs and all of the trappings and baggage that come with such activities. Updike was correct to explore the advent of sexual liberation, but his ideas are lost in translation. Forty years past, this member of the millennial generation is searching for the real smut, and finding none relegates Couples to the back of the Updike collection, a shame too, because this book had so much promise and fell short.

This post is dedicated to my mom, Jennifer, who pushes me every day to be the best that I can be. I hope this writing showed more effort and intelligence on the work, mom.