Word: piet
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Alone of the characters in Couples, Piet is married to Iseult-the unreachable Angela, who cannot yield to him though she recognizes him as "the only person who ever tried to batter through to me." Life with Angela thus becomes for Piet an unbearable nostalgia, embodied in her, and his salvation comes down to a matter of attempting to tolerate the intolerable. They are "ordained for divorce," says Updike, and their submission is an acknowledgment of death's approach...
...sleeping with whom except by drawing a chart. (The generous explanation is that this is not due to the author's lack of craftsmanship, but rather that it represents a deliberate attempt to show the dreary interchangeability of the adulterers.) The novel is seen largely through Piet's intelligence and sensibilities. Most of the other male characters are unreal, merely equipped with identifying jobs and stigmata. Updike paints Foxy and Angela full-length and achieves an equal effect in far fewer brush strokes with Marcia and Janet, two of the husband swappers. The trouble is that with some...
...comedy. He dares to hope for both the reality of God and the sanity of society, and he sees sex not as a target but as a sanctuary. Scenes that other writers would play as burlesque, Updike plays straight, no matter how absurd they are. In Couples, for example, Piet and Foxy have huddled in an upstairs bathroom during the Kennedy night party. Her breasts are milk-laden after the birth of her baby. "Nurse me!," begs Piet. Foxy consents, but moments later, Angela knocks at the door In panic, Piet leaps out of the window to the ground...
Above and behind his reverence which extends to oral encounters between Piet and Foxy-looms Updike's central metaphor. He finds in sex an expression of his own Piet-like quest to recapture the past. Nostalgia suffuses him, goads him, at times frightens him. At home, in Ipswich, Mass., Updike spends hours leafing through boyhood photograph albums. "I find old photographs powerful," he says. "There's a funny thing about the way the flux of time was halted at this particular spot. You just can't get back...
...Scandal. During the past few years, Ipswich has at last been taking over from Shillington as the prod to Updike's imagination, and his short stories have abandoned their boyhood themes and begun to examine the years of his maturity. Like Piet Hanema struggling to accept his God, Updike has suffered doubts...