7 - Couples and “The Hillies”

Summary

AS I SUGGESTED SEVERAL CHAPTERS AGO, Couples in some ways rewrites and expands Marry Me, replicating the imaginary universe created by Jerry and Sally as an incredible act of collective imagination on the part of five suburban Boston couples. A writer's most commercially successful novel is rarely his most artistically successful, however, and Updike is no exception. Couples made him a household name, but it is the weakest of his novels of the 1960s and 1970s. Its moments of genuine power tend to come from smaller relationships within the larger panoply of marriages and affairs that make up the fabric of the novel. That the whole adds up to less than the sum of its parts, however, does not make those parts any less interesting, and that the novel as a whole does not succeed does not mean it is not worth the pages of ink that have been spilled over it. But I do think that Couples makes the most aesthetic and thematic sense when considered as a rewriting of Marry Me, a necessary repression of the novel that Updike wanted to write (and had already written) for the good of his marriage and family. Spreading his infidelities out over the whole of Tarbox, Massachusetts, allows him to conceal the real-world analogues of the events that inspired the novel, to the point where he could claim, incredibly, in Time's famous 1968 cover story on him, that he was a mere observer of this milieu instead of an active participant in it—that he was “personally Puritan.”

Even so, Couples has clear connections to Updike's earlier fiction, and its central husband and wife—Piet and Angela Hanema—are instantly recognizable as stand-ins for John and Mary Updike. Something in Angela calls Piet to a higher lifestyle. Nine years into their marriage, “Piet still felt, with Angela, a superior power seeking through her to employ him.” But he resents this call to a better life. His resentment will be familiar to readers who know “Marching through Boston,” published a few years before Couples.