View from the Catacombs

(3 of 11)
"Welcome," says Georgene Thorne, "to the postpill paradise." Leisure, cars and baby sitters give them the mobility to track any pleasure. Only the children tie the couples to what used to be called adult responsibilities, and even they are occasionally trundled about from bed to bed to make room for their elders. "All these goings-on would be purely lyrical, like nymphs and satyrs in a grove," said Updike recently, "except for the group of distressed and neglected children."

Lyrical is not the final word for the desperate tribal rites that come to consume the lives of the couples. At the novel's outset they are merely a gang of friends who, like so many smalltown sets, see rather too much of one another. They gather for endless whisky-driven parties by night, spend their weekends playing games. They gossip in the faintly malicious, secretly thrilled saxophone tones of bourgeois life.

Most of the gossip concerns Piet Hanema, redhaired, stocky, 35-year-old father of two girls, housebuilder and restorer, a man "in love with snug, right-angled things." He is at once the sturdiest and the most pathetic character in Couples, a quasi-Christian and would-be family pillar who finds real joy in such things as "the children's choir's singing, an unsteady theft of melody." His adventures in adultery are an almost accidental byproduct of his own spiritual confusion, his wife's complicated sexual indifference and the irresistible why-not willingness of the women around him. "Georgene had brought to their affair, like a dowry of virginal lace, this lightness, this guiltlessness." Piet responds not to the excitement but to the wondrous ease of it all, the astonishing luxury of fornication with eager women behind bedroom walls apparently opaque to the fierce eye of his Calvinist God.

Tut-Tutty. Less starry-eyed than Piet, the other couples also begin to ease themselves into each other's beds—some out of boredom, some for revenge, some because they find nothing forbidden, and others because in the past too much has been forbidden. Over the whole group hovers the satanic, death-worshiping Freddy Thorne. He is a dentist by trade, but in fact he is a faithless St. Augustine indulging his "hyena appetite for dirty truths" in his role as Updike's designated "priest" to the tribe. "He thinks we're a magic circle of heads to keep the night out," says Angela Hanema. "He thinks we've made a church of one another."

They very nearly have. Half from choice, half from unspoken fear, the couples herd together like sheep in a storm. During the time of the novel—mid-1963 to mid-1964—the life of the town reaches into them only in minor ways, and the life of the world beyond Tarbox is noted by the author rather than the characters (as upper-middle-class people did in those days, they joke about White House philandering).

The news of John Kennedy's assassination touches them all—but very much in their own way. Freddy Thorne hears it over the radio in his dental office. "You hear that?" says Freddy. "Some crazy Texan. You may spit." A few minutes later, J.F.K. is dead, and Freddy thinks of canceling his party that night. "But I've bought the booze," he says.

The party goes on, a grisly