Word: novelized
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Dates: during 1960-1969
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...MUCH of the novel it is impossible to remember who is married to whom. In adultery the tenuous meaning we create by marriage is destroyed, and one human is the same as any other. Eros is no respector of persons. Sexuality is a force as indifferent as electricity to the copper wire of our bodies. Women are, as Piet Hanema, the main character says, "vessels to be filled...
...Children in Tarbox are mainly encumbrances to their parents. They are bundled up and transported, even when sick and feverish, so that the couples may continue their adulterous visits. It is the children who finally give an air of pathos to the network of affairs that makes up the novel...
Piet is unable to refuse an encounter. At the end of the book he has been drained of all sense of choice, of free action. His will has been sacrificed to the author's formulation. It is perhaps this sense of authorial intrusion that is the novel's main flaw, that accounts for its lack of expansiveness, its lack of extended meanings, its lack of resonance...
...wish that the world not be as Updike sees it--cold, without essential human feelings or grandeur--that causes me to seek a refuge in these artistic strictures. But Couples does seem a novel in which the author's volition, his thesis, have been allowed to substitute for the free play of the imagination, for a full measure of humanity for his characters...
...characteristic tone of Updike's prose is elegiac. He is, by his attention to it, paying homage to the world, preserving it, transfiguring it, declaring it all worth saving. One can quote at random from his novel, for every page has gems of observation, rhythmic and charming passages of prose. Only the transcribed stream-of-consciousness of Piet is ever dull or banal...