Vol. 36 No. 1 1969 - page 136

136
ELIZABETH DALTON
stantly that insight comes to seem facile and monotonous. The ultimate
motive and meaning of a novel, that dim thing on which all its struc–
ture rests, is here made external and explicit, plastered all over it like
wallpaper. The author is just too knowing; there is nothing about
his
subject that is more powerful than his understanding of it.
Despite the fancy fucking, Updike's work continues to give the
im–
pression of a shortage of experience, at least of the kind that structures
and dramatizes. It's hard to take seriously the wife-swapping of a
bunch of banal and indistinguishable characters. The point, of course,
is that they
are
banal. But behind this explicit statement the novel is
really indicating something quite different, something that accounts for
its great popularity with the very people it's about: around the petty
humiliations and feeble rebellions of these characters hangs an aura of
nostalgia and wasted beauty that claims indulgence for them, a sort of
pathos of middle-class life. In this version of pastoral the hero has fallen
from potent innocence into the stale mediocrity of marriage; women
are the villains, however unwitting, and sex the snare. The copulation
scenes begin lusciously enough -
"If
her touch could be believed,
his
balls were all velvet, his phallus sheer silver" - but it all turns to
post-coital sadness and sharp-eyed observation of the less attractive fea–
tures of the ladies involved: baggy breasts, thick haunches and varicose
veins.
This narcissistic obsession with declining beauty and potency is at
the heart of
Couples.
Essentially a sentimental vision of life, it gilds
everything with a sadness arising not from the experience itself, but
from some wan expectation on the author's part, some adolescent
squeamishness that endows people in their twenties with a pathetic air
of approaching mortality and makes all of life after high-school gradua–
tion a long self-pitying downward glide towards death.
The bedizened prose, in its elaboration of their tiniest feelings,
hovers tenderly over these affluent suburbanites as if they were all
twelve-year-oIds dying of leukemia. It is this much praised style, even
more than the preacherish moral vision or the anachronistic technique,
that makes
Couples
seem such an irrelevant exercise. Apparently
ef–
fortless and inexhaustible, in its fatal facility it trivializes everything it
touches, finally making one feel that what can be written with such
ease is not worth writing at all.
Elizabeth Dalton
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