Couples

"Not entirely. I think Updike was a brilliant novelist and stylist and also a brilliant critic. But I gave up. I couldn’t keep up with Updike. I think that the short stories are his great legacy. I think the novels are all rather uneven and not fully achieved, with the possible exception of Couples . But Couples is another one of those books that I read at a very young age and it blew me away. Again, I must have been 19 or so when I read it, and for me it was like a window being opened onto the adult world, a world I was about to enter. I suddenly thought that this man understands human nature and the human condition in a way that I had never encountered before. That said, a lot of people regard Couples as his least successful novel because it seems overly preoccupied with sexual shenanigans in New England. I’ve gone back and re-read Couples and it holds up, for me, in way that Catch-22 doesn’t. It’s a brilliantly well-written and observed book. But its relevance to me – and this is why I put it on the list – is because at the time that I read it, veils were stripped from my eyes. I saw the world differently as a result of reading the book. It’s a great experience when that happens to you. You could almost say that Updike was a prolific American Jane Austen in the sense that he wrote about the same world again and again and again. Maybe because he was so prolific, the effects of reading yet another novel about middle-class adultery in New England began to pall. But he was a great prose stylist. The line-by-line pleasures are very genuine. Scott Fitzgerald said – and this very much applies to Updike – that we novelists have our two or three stories to tell, and we tell them again and again as long as someone is prepared to listen. I think this is very true about Updike. His canvas was narrow, but he painted it with incredible detail and astonishing fecundity. But I think in a way that’s going to make him seem oddly parochial. At the centre of Couples , the relationship that he pursues between the Dutch builder and his wife and their various betrayals and adulteries is quite powerful and self-destructive. I wonder if it’s an autobiographical element in Updike’s own life that fuelled that. That’s what my subsequent re-reading of the book has brought home to me. It’s not about wife swapping or sex in the suburbs, it’s about this man’s urge to betray his lovely wife. There is more going on there, and now that Updike has left us, time will tell. I’m sure, as the biographies are written, we might find a different propulsion behind those scenes. I still think the book is a fantastically acute and brilliantly well-observed account of society, even though that society happens to be well-to-do, middle-class America. It gets the human condition really well. In his short stories that richness doesn’t clot or cloy. The 300 or 400 pages of a novel are almost too rich a meal. His short stories somehow cohere in a way that’s more satisfying, for me anyway, than the novels. His Rabbit books are good but they are not great and enduring because they are too much, in a way. I used to teach Updike’s short stories a lot. I pulled them apart and analysed them, and they are really brilliant examples of the genre functioning at their most sophisticated and telling, but of course he wrote hundreds of them. It’s not like Chekhov where there are maybe 20 absolute masterpieces. Updike just seemed to spew out the words and of course you don’t always know where to find the good stuff. Even his four or five huge volumes of criticism – there’s nothing dull about them, they’re full of insights and you just marvel at his energy but it’s almost pathological in its logorrhea. I don’t. I think the answer is: Less is more. When sex scenes are called for in a novel, you shouldn’t shy away from writing them. But you don’t need to go the full DH Lawrence, John Updike route. It’s all about selection to create the sense of power. I think Updike was too in love with his own sumptuous prose style to hold back, so he’s very easy to parody and mock."