Couples
A Novel
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4.3 • 3 Ratings
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- $12.99
Publisher Description
“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.”—Time
One of The Atlantic’s Great American Novels of the Past 100 Years
One of the signature novels of the American 1960s, Couples is a book that, when it debuted, scandalized the public with prose pictures of the way people live, and that today provides an engrossing epitaph to the short, happy life of the “post-Pill paradise.” It chronicles the interactions of ten young married couples in a seaside New England community who make a cult of sex and of themselves. The group of acquaintances form a magical circle, complete with ritualistic games, religious substitutions, a priest (Freddy Thorne), and a scapegoat (Piet Hanema). As with most American utopias, this one’s existence is brief and unsustainable, but the “imaginative quest” that inspires its creation is eternal.
Praise for Couples
“Couples [is] John Updike’s tour de force of extramarital wanderlust.”—The New York Times Book Review
“Ingenious . . . If this is a dirty book, I don’t see how sex can be written about at all.”—Wilfrid Sheed, The New York Times Book Review
Customer Reviews
Couples
As a child growing up, I remember seeing this book on my mom’s bookshelf. I thought about it, some fifty years later, and decided to download it, and read it. Wow! My mom had in her possession a work of literary art that was racey, sexually explicit, very historically relevant and beautiful. This book told me how a group of people, very successful yet ordinary people existed, if only in a make believe world. Despite its length, I read it in a very short time and absolutely loved it, and often thought while reading it, “what was going around in mom’s head as she turned the pages?”
I highly recommend reading this book!