Word: sexes
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Dates: during 1960-1969
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Permutations. The fact is that beneath this suburban idyl, Updike's couples are caught up in a black mass of community sex. Their Puritan gods have retreated to unawesome, half-deserted churches, where beaten clergymen, sizing up the businessman congregations, croak about an improbable Christ who "offers us present security, four-and-a-half percent compounded every quarter." The Biblical woman accused of adultery would be safe in Tarbox; here no stones are thrown, only envious glances. With no heat left in the Protestant American crucible, the comfortable couples of Tarbox have reached out for another kind of warmth...
Nymphs & Satyrs. Trapped in their cozy catacombs, the couples have made sex by turns their toy, their glue, their trauma, their therapy, their hope, their frustration, their revenge, their narcotic, their main line of communication and their sole and pitiable shield against the awareness of death. Adultery, says Updike, has become a kind of "imaginative quest" for a successful hedonism that would enable man to enjoy an otherwise meaningless life. But to seek pleasure is not necessarily to find...
...itself out almost mechanically: Foxy's fetus is aborted, the Whitmans and the Hanemas get divorced, Piet and Foxy marry and move away. The remaining couples take up bridge, their place in the town having been quietly usurped by a younger crowd that "held play readings, and kept sex in its place, and experimented with LSD." Toward the end, Updike provides a fortissimo blast of obvious symbolism: the Congregational Church goes up in an apocalyptic fire that leaves untouched only the old tin weathercock, riding high over the gutted house...
...gods are dead and their graves untended, morality is a matter of picking one's way between competing absurdities, and the only sane reaction to society-to its alleged truths and virtues, its would-be terrors and taboos-is a cackle or a scream of possibly cathartic laughter. Sex in particular is the target, and the black humorists especially have been stripping away its pretensions to holiness, love mystery and galactic consequence...
Dionysian Yelps. It would be hard to exaggerate how far removed Updike is from this view of the world as lunatic 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...