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ELIZABETH DALTON
TO HAVE AND HAVE NOT
COUPLES. By
John Updike. Alfred A. Knopf.
$6.95.
In its delicacy and fullness Updike's style seems to register
a flow of fragments almost perfectly toned. And yet, after pages and
pages of his minutely detailed impressions, the accumulated effect is
one of waste. There's something self-consciously graceful and poetic
about the long rhythms of the phrases. It's all so immensely
written.
What it all purports to be for in
Couples
is the exposure of a
sensibility and life style, that of the midthirtyish Eastern-seaboard upper–
middle class. The couples of the title live in T arbox, an old New Eng–
land town turning exurb, where their principal pastime is adultery. The
mixed doubles that constitute the plot are played on a religio-symbolic
court, and the hero, Piet Hanema, is seen in his dalliance with various
Paramours as a sort of Everyman trying to cheat Death. At last over–
taken, Piet arranges an abortion for Foxy, his pregnant mistress, where–
upon God strikes the Congregational church with lightning and Piet is
forced to divorce his wife, marry Foxy, and leave Tarbox for another
town and another group of couples. The moral of the story is that
America is on the skids because the middle class goes to bed instead of
to church.
One thing Updike can never be accused of is what Henry James
called "weak specification." Tarbox and its inhabitants are built up
with a compulsive sociological detail that makes the novel seem almost
a parody of the realistic convention: houses, children, clothes, cars,
places, brand names, family histories. When Piet and Foxy meet in a
parking lot every store around the lot is named, from the A&P to Beth's
Books and Cards. Yet in spite of the enormous amount of evidence
about these people, it's hard to tell them apart. As though he knew
this, the author has given each one a little Dickensian tic or tag that
can serve as an
aide-memoire:
Harold speaks fractured French, Frank
quotes Shakespeare, Janet has a big bosom, etc. Nevertheless, most of
the characters get swamped in the welter of realistic detail about them.
Or perhaps they go down under the pressure of the style, a prose
so full of tricks that it seems to be constantly making a claim for the
author's personal cleverness. It is larded with adjectives, stuffed with
metaphors, as if everything had to be compared to something else and
