View from the Catacombs

AUTHORS

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In this peaceful town, pretty birds sing and the sumac twines. Along the edge of the mothering sea stand colonial cottages reaped from the wasted fields of the American Revolution and threshed into 20th century quaintness. Church steeples point for all to see toward the virtuous life. Railroad tracks dwindle northward toward Boston, an unconcerned hour away. This is Tarbox, Mass., the setting of John Updike's new novel Couples, where primitive American democracy reveals itself in town meetings, and three streets of the business district are named Hope, Charity and Divinity.

As in many such communities, the good citizens of Tarbox accept health, wealth and wisdom as natural perquisites of their membership in the American middle class. Tarbox is a fun place too. Almost any Sunday, one can find a bunch of the fellows tossing around a basketball in somebody's driveway, while the women chat and watch and the children scramble and squabble. There's likely to be a spirited game of tennis at John and Bernadette Ong's place, followed by a few tall, cold vodka-and-tonics perhaps at Matt and Terry Gallagher's. The women can be depended upon to keep the co-op nursery school running smoothly. And thank heavens for Irene Saltz, without whose all-fired energy Tarbox would never have achieved such an effective League of Women Voters or Fair Housing Group. Quiet, lovely town, Tarbox. Or so it seems.

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. Updike is forthright about his purpose. "There's a lot of dry talk around about love and sex being somehow the new ground of our morality," he said recently. "I thought I should show the ground and ask, is it entirely to be wished for?"

Show the ground he certainly does. Harold Smith is bedding down with Janet Appleby, and Marcia Smith with Frank Appleby; their set calls them the Applesmiths. Eddie Constantine and Irene Saltz make it together, and so do Ben Saltz and Carol Constantine; they are the Saltines. As for Piet Hanema, call him insatiable; he expands the permutations by sleeping with Georgene Thorne, Bea Guerin, Carol Constantine and especially Foxy Whitman. The sexual scenes, and the language that accompanies them, are remarkably explicit, even for this new age of total freedom of expression. Some critics have dismissed Couples as an upper-middle-class Peyton Place. It isn't, but it is getting a sensational reception all the same. Only three weeks after publication, the novel is on the bestseller lists. Knopf ordered a huge first printing of 70,000 copies, and Hollywood's Wolper Productions paid $500,000 for the movie rights.

Elegiac Concern. Despite the heavy breathing on all sides, Updike in Couples is really only reworking the territory that he has claimed for his own since he made his first appearance as a New Yorker short-story writer 15 years ago. In his own words, he is "kind of elegiacally concerned with the Protestant middle class." Among modern American writers, only John Cheever shares Updike's sense of accumulated loss, his feeling that the national past contained a wholeness and an essential goodness that have now evaporated. Even John O'Hara, an acknowledged social historian, makes no plea for the special virtues of the past. For other novelists, the present may be a disaster, but there is no indication that things ever were any better. When they do turn to the antecedents--John Barth in The Sot-Weed Factor or William Styron in The Confessions of Nat Turner--it is only to show that America has been headed for catastrophe right from the start.

Updike sees not catastrophe but an approach to fulfillment in past American experience, and his earlier work was a fond evocation of its elemental struggles, its integral faith and its microcosmic triumphs. In Couples, this elegy is modulated into a lament for the pampered, wayward millions of today.

"America is like an unloved child smothered in candy," says Piet Hanema. "God doesn't love us any more. He loves Russia. He loves Uganda. We're fat and full of pimples and always whining for more candy. We've fallen from grace."

At 36, Updike may have found in the hedonistic couples of Tarbox the explosive expression of his theme that his work has always lacked.

His four earlier novels--The Poorhouse Fair, Rabbit, Run, The Centaur, Of the Farm--were praised, sometimes extravagantly, as the work of a man who was surely destined to write a "major" novel. The trouble was that he was too much the poet, too much the pointillistic stylist, too self-concerned with scenes, images and feelings sensed in a severely limited autobiographical world. He was justly acccused of hiding behind his family and childhood, of not daring the larger, extra-domestic themes that his technical prowess promised, or conversely, of trying to inflate his tiny genre scenes into balloons of cosmic significance. Updike, wrote Critic John Aldridge, "has nothing to say," while Leslie Fiedler complains, "He writes essentially 19th century novels. He's irrelevant."

Couples is flawed by overwriting and undercharacterization, but the charge of irrelevance will no longer stand up. Updike has taken a particularly American theme, and a highly topical one. One character sums it up thus: "We're a subversive cell, like in the catacombs. Only they were trying to break out of hedonism. We're trying to break back into it. It's not easy."

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 it.

The couples of Tarbox live in a place and time that together seem to have been ordained for this quest. "Welcome," says Georgene Thorne, "to the postpill paradise." Leisure, cars and baby sitters give them the mobility to track any pleasure. Only the children tie the couples to what used to be called adult responsibilities, and even they are occasionally trundled about from bed to bed to make room for their elders. "All these goings-on would be purely lyrical, like nymphs and satyrs in a grove," said Updike recently, "except for the group of distressed and neglected children."

Lyrical is not the final word for the desperate tribal rites that come to consume the lives of the couples. At the novel's outset they are merely a gang of friends who, like so many smalltown sets, see rather too much of one another. They gather for endless whisky-driven parties by night, spend their weekends playing games. They gossip in the faintly malicious, secretly thrilled saxophone tones of bourgeois life.

Most of the gossip concerns Piet Hanema, redhaired, stocky, 35-year-old father of two girls, housebuilder and restorer, a man "in love with snug, right-angled things." He is at once the sturdiest and the most pathetic character in Couples, a quasi-Christian and would-be family pillar who finds real joy in such things as "the children's choir's singing, an unsteady theft of melody." His adventures in adultery are an almost accidental byproduct of his own spiritual confusion, his wife's complicated sexual indifference and the irresistible why-not willingness of the women around him. "Georgene had brought to their affair, like a dowry of virginal lace, this lightness, this guiltlessness." Piet responds not to the excitement but to the wondrous ease of it all, the astonishing luxury of fornication with eager women behind bedroom walls apparently opaque to the fierce eye of his Calvinist God.

Tut-Tutty. Less starry-eyed than Piet, the other couples also begin to ease themselves into each other's beds--some out of boredom, some for revenge, some because they find nothing forbidden, and others because in the past too much has been forbidden. Over the whole group hovers the satanic, death-worshiping Freddy Thorne. He is a dentist by trade, but in fact he is a faithless St. Augustine indulging his "hyena appetite for dirty truths" in his role as Updike's designated "priest" to the tribe. "He thinks we're a magic circle of heads to keep the night out," says Angela Hanema. "He thinks we've made a church of one another."

They very nearly have. Half from choice, half from unspoken fear, the couples herd together like sheep in a storm. During the time of the novel--mid-1963 to mid-1964--the life of the town reaches into them only in minor ways, and the life of the world beyond Tarbox is noted by the author rather than the characters (as upper-middle-class people did in those days, they joke about White House philandering).

The news of John Kennedy's assassination touches them all--but very much in their own way. Freddy Thorne hears it over the radio in his dental office. "You hear that?" says Freddy. "Some crazy Texan. You may spit." A few minutes later, J.F.K. is dead, and Freddy thinks of canceling his party that night. "But I've bought the booze," he says.

The party goes on, a grisly set piece pointing up the couples' encapsulation. The couples act as ever, drinking too much, gossiping about the affairs already begun and negotiating arrangements for the next. Harold Smith tells of how he and "three of my most Republican associates" were having lunch when the news came. "Well, naturally everyone assumed that a right-wing crackpot had done it," he says. "We were all very pious and tut-tutty. Then young Ed called up absolutely ecstatic and said, 'Did you hear? It wasn't one of ours, it was one of theirs!' " And the party goes on.

The Ritual. Freddy's dirty truths and Piet's butterfly adulteries converge with the arrival in Tarbox of Foxy Whitman and her husband Ken, a biochemist preoccupied with his own second-rateness. Alone of the women, Foxy seems unafraid of what Freddy calls "the smell and hurt of love"; seven years of childless boredom with Ken have made her vulnerable. Now, though she is pregnant, she and Piet Hanema fall in love, an old-fashioned and banal assertion of life that brings down on them and the tribe the old-fashioned and banal tribulations of middle-class guilt, entrapment and helplessness.

After the Whitman baby is born, Foxy gets pregnant by Piet. In panic, they turn to Freddy Thorne for help in finding an abortionist. There follows a rather absurd turn of plot that seems straight out of 19th century melodrama. All but twirling his mustachios, Freddy agrees--in return for a night alone with Piet's wife Angela, the one woman in the tribe who has never entered the communal bed. Implausibly, Angela consents. One night in a ski lodge, after the Thornes and the Hanemas have had too much to drink, Angela suddenly says, "Well, is this the night?" Georgene Thorne, helpless, furious, goes to her room. Angela busses Piet fondly and prepares to go upstairs with Thorne.

"Freddy," says Piet, "should you get your toothbrush or anything?"

The rest of the ritual plays 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 of God.

So much for paradise. In Updike's ironic words, "it's a happy-ending book --everybody gets what he wants." The kicker, of course, is that "getting it is just as frustrating as not getting it" and the would-be hedonists retreat in defeat from their obsessive adulteries.

For Piet Hanema alone, the chase into neighborly beds comes close to the course of tragedy. Unlike the others he is hounded not only by lust, curiosity and boredom but by a terrible sense of time fleeing. He is haunted by the past by shepherds paralyzed in webs of lead his boyhood Dutch Reformed Church, by his father's rough hands tending the fragile flowers in his greenhouse, most of all by his parents' death in an automobile accident. ("Piet pictured shattered glass strewn across the road and saw snow continue to descend sparkling in the policemen's whirling lights.") Death for Piet is not a future moment in time: it is time itself, and life is what Updike calls "a series of little losses" leading toward the dry well. Piet fights death by trying to turn time around, to recapture the past, to make manifest the heaven of nostalgia.

Updike has found a tantalizing metaphor for this quest in the legend of Iseult--the unattainable woman who vanishes at the instant she is possessed. "What is it that shines from Iseult's face but our own past, with its strange innocence and its strange need to be redeemed?" he wrote in an essay in 1963 What is nostalgia but love for that part of ourselves which is in Heaven forever removed from change and corruption? A woman, loved, momentarily eases the pain of time by localizing nostalgia: the vague and irrecoverable objects of nostalgic longing are assimilated, under the pressure of libidinous desire, into the details of her person "

Alone of the characters in Couples, Piet is married to Iseult--the unreachable Angela, who cannot yield to him though she recognizes him as "the only person who ever tried to batter through to me." Life with Angela thus becomes for Piet an unbearable nostalgia, embodied in her, and his salvation comes down to a matter of attempting to tolerate the intolerable. They are "ordained for divorce," says Updike, and their submission is an acknowledgment of death's approach.

Horrid Little Man. Updike possesses uneven skill as a manipulator or impersonator of characters. For more than half the book it is virtually impossible tell the characters apart or to remember who is sleeping with whom except by drawing a chart. (The generous explanation is that this is not due to the author's lack of craftsmanship, but rather that it represents a deliberate attempt to show the dreary interchangeability of the adulterers.) The novel is seen largely through Piet's intelligence and sensibilities. Most of the other male characters are unreal, merely equipped with identifying jobs and stigmata. Updike paints Foxy and Angela full-length and achieves an equal effect in far fewer brush strokes with Marcia and Janet, two of the husband swappers. The trouble is that with some minor differences, he seems to have used the same woman as model for them all--a well-meaning, even-temped, sexually adept American frau with not a bitch or a shrew, a man-hater or child-worshiper in the crowd.

As for the celebrated Updike prose style, it is present in all its gradations, which is to say that it ranges from the exquisite to the embarrassing. At its best, Updike's writing flows with an unforgettable, lilting legato: "October's orange ebbed in the marshes; they stretched dud grey to the far rim of sand." The talk of a husband and wife in bed at night, speaking of their children or their friends, evokes in tone and languor the bedroom conversation familiar to all parents. In the Guerins' home, guests move through "a low varnished hallway where on a mock cobbler's bench their coats and hats huddle like a heap of the uninvited." Houses have windows whose panes are "flecked with oblong bubbles and tinged with lavender." A television screen's "icy brilliance implies a universe of profound cold beyond the warm encirclement of Tarbox, friends, and family."

And then, at times, Updike's virtuosity leads to excess that smothers meaning and clogs the reader's senses as when he writes of "the shallow amber depths where the lemon slice like an embryo swam." That is a bowl of soup.

His descriptive splurges seem old-fashioned at a time when most writers are still either in thrall to Hemingway's ideal of verbal simplicity or overflowing with a new kind of personal, revival-meeting combustion that lies somewhere between caterwauling and glossolalia. But prose style is one of the minor differences between Updike and his contemporaries. The larger fact is that however valid his own objectives and achievements, he has ignored the mainstream of contemporary Western fiction. The French, in the roman nouveau, have reduced the novel to a random series of received sounds and images; the English are tearing apart seven centuries of established order.

The Americans, meanwhile, have adopted comedy as their tool and social alienation and absurdity as their twin themes. Nearly every important American writer--Nabokov, Mailer Barm, Bellow, Malamud, Donleavy, Roth, Friedman, Burroughs, Heller, Pynchon, Willingham--works from an assumption that society is at best malevolent and stupid, at worst wholly lunatic. The 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 consents, but moments later, Angela knocks at the door In panic, Piet leaps out of the window to the ground two floors below. The author never even winks.

This earnestness in the face of farce is of a piece with Updike's general reverence toward sex. His contemporaries invade the ground with wild Dionysian yelps, mocking both the taboos that would make it forbidden and the lust that drives men to it. Updike can be honest about it, and his descriptions of the sight, taste and texture of women's bodies can be perfect little madrigals.

He celebrates Janet's "nude unity of so many shades of cream and pink and lilac." But too often he mixes four-letter words with what Norman Mailer once called the "stale garlic" of his lyricism (the offense being not in the four-letter words but in the garlic). Occasionally, the garlic stands alone, as in Updike's description of a man and woman achieving climax: "So he did then travel through a palace of cloth and sliding stairways throughout the casket of perfume that she spilled upon him from a dozen angles, all radiant."

Above and behind his reverence which extends to oral encounters between Piet and Foxy--looms Updike's central metaphor. He finds in sex an expression of his own Piet-like quest to recapture the past. Nostalgia suffuses him, goads him, at times frightens him. At home, in Ipswich, Mass., Updike spends hours leafing through boyhood photograph albums. "I find old photographs powerful," he says. "There's a funny thing about the way the flux of time was halted at this particular spot. You just can't get back to it."

Not for want of trying. The whole corpus of Updike's fiction before Couples amounts to a memoir of his boyhood. His mother has called those writings "valentines" to the friends and family back home in the small (pop. 5,639) Pennsylvania Dutch farm town of Shillington, three miles from Reading, where John was born. His mother, Linda Grace Hoyer Updike, is a cosmopolitan, well-educated writer herself (four stories in The New Yorker since John blazed the way), and she has always loathed everything about Shillington. She admits now to having broken up a high-school romance of John's because the girl was "of Shillington, this place I found so contemptible."

His mother's sense of desolation in the small town was further chaffed by the Updikes' poverty. When John was 13, his family had to move to his grandparents' 90-acre farm ten miles away where John's father, Wesley, now 68 supported the five of them on his junior-high-school math teacher's pay of $1,740 a year. That sum did not provide for indoor plumbing, and John and his father bathed at school. It was not until twelve years ago that water was brought into the two-bedroom farmhouse. "Every time I take a bath I can't believe it " says Wesley Updike.

Haunted Halls. With nudging from his mother, John's writing career began at the age of eight, when he sat down at her typewriter and pecked out his first story, beginning: "The tribe of Bum-Bums looked very solemn as they sat around their cosy cave fire." Even with this early start, his writing career lagged three years behind his parallel interest in cartooning and painting: he had had a collage published in a children's magazine when he was five.

The Updikes were so poor and isolated, John recalls, that "in a way I've always felt estranged from the middle class--locked out of it." In one of the dozens of stories that he wrote about his boyhood, he describes how "the air of that house crystallizes: our neglected teeth, our poor and starchy diet, our worn floors, our musty and haunted halls." The "genius" of his mother he wrote elsewhere, "was to give the people closest to her mythic immensity," and under her companionship, "consciousness of a special destiny made me both arrogant and shy."

In his teens, Updike threw himself into the life at Shillington High School with a kind of desperado love, writing like a fiend, drawing like a dervish, wooing his classmates with methods that have remained standard to this day Whenever he felt neglected or unappreciated, he took a pratfall. "I developed the technique," he explains, "as a way of somehow exorcising theevil spirits and winning approval and defying death--and I don't know what it all means. I spent a lot of time in high school throwing myself over stair railings."

Imitations & Echoes. The technique worked so well that he was elected class president and editor of the school paper, the Chatterbox, to which he contributed countless drawings and a flood of articles and light verse, not the least of which was a poem called "Child's Question": "O, is it true/ A word with Q/ The usual U/ Does lack?/ I grunt and strain, /But, no, in vain, /My weary brain/ Iraq." He also earned straight A's. His mother, leafing through an anthology of prizewinning short stories calculated that more prizewinning authors had gone to Harvard than any where else, and thereupon dispatched John to Cambridge, where he was given a full scholarship.

He arrived at Harvard in the fall of 1950, scrawny, big-nosed, friendless cabbage green, and lugging three scrapbooks of poems with their rejection slips from The New Yorker, Saturday Evening Post and Collier's. His four years in Cambridge were marked by a series of triumphs, marred only by his failure three times running to get accepted into Poet Archibald MacLeish's creative-writing seminar. He poured his energies into the Lampoon, the undergraduate humor magazine. At the end of his sophomore year, he met a fine-arts major at Radcliffe named Mary Pennington, two years his senior and the daughter of a Unitarian minister in Chicago. "I courted her essentially by falling down the stairs of the Fogg Museum several times," Updike recalls.

They were married after his junior year. He graduated summa cum laude in English, after turning in a thesis titled "Non-Horatian Elements in Robert Herrick's Imitations and Echoes of Horace." It was a splendid college career, but in retrospect, Updike feels that Harvard somehow sapped him of some vague, irreplaceable vitality. "I feel in some obscure way ashamed of the Harvard years. They were a betrayal of my high school years, really. Harvard, in exchange for a great deal of work, made me a civilized man. It's somehow painful."

Optic Nerve. After his graduation, the Updikes took a year just for fun at the Ruskin School of Drawing and Fine Art at Oxford, and in time he landed a staff job on The New Yorker. "He thought he'd be only a humorist," Mary remembers. "He didn't think of himself as a serious writer." Yet he spent words profligately in an attempt to translate his painter's eye into language, to catch and fix the thing seen and bring all the colors and shapes and textures of the visible world to bear on his narrative. Novelist John Earth calls Updike the "Andrew Wyeth of literature," adding: "I think one has the same mixture of admiration and reservation for the work of both."

The sum of Updike's work is astonishing for a young man: to date, in addition to the novels, he has written more than 23 articles, 24 reviews, 185 short stories and 23 poems, most of them appearing in The New Yorker. The poems are wry, tightly turned and "light"--meaning that they make their point comically rather than gravely, even when, as in three little quatrains called "Bestiary," he comments on something as complex as natural man's unnatural rationality. The critical and reportorial essays, graceful and superbly controlled, reveal an informed intelligence that can plunge unafraid into the rip currents of Vladimir Nabokov or write a better analysis of the nature of parody than the very good one that appeared as preface to the anthology he was reviewing. And it is somehow endearing to know that the same hand that wrote The New Yorker's sane, knowledgeable review of James Joyce's recently discovered fragment Giacomo Joyce, also turned out the epic 1960 farewell to Ted Williams, Hub Fans Bid Kid Adieu.

Swinger & Bum. After the Updikes moved to Ipswich in 1957, John found himself more than ever in thrall to his homeward-looking vision. So many short stories flowed from his reservoir of nostalgia that he collected eleven of the best in a volume called Olinger Stories--Olinger being "audibly a shadow of Shillington," Updike wrote, and yet something other. "The surrounding land is loamy, and Olinger is haunted--hexed, perhaps--by rural memories, accents and superstitions. It is beyond the western edge of Megalopolis, and hangs between its shallow hills enchanted, nowhere, anywhere; there is no place like it. Olinger is a state of mind, of my mind, and it belongs entirely to me."

Updike's novels, though very much distinct from each other, were each rooted in the past. The Poorhouse Fair, though ostensibly set in New Jersey, was really drawn from the old folks' home near the Updike house in Shillington, and told a slight, whispered story of the accumulating sense of pointlessness among the inmates. From there, Updike leaped two generations to Rabbit, Run, a quietly savage novel about a former high school basketball star who simply runs away from wife, child, job and the suffocating box of senseless moral obligations. It was a flawlessly turned portrait of a social cripple who understood somehow that, running, he was more alive than he would be standing still. It was also, says an old friend of Updike's, "a picture of John, if he had been a better basketball player and had married a home-town girl."

The Centaur was a loving tribute to his father, an endearing old-style eccentric in whom Updike sees "the Protestant kind of goodness going down with all the guns firing--antic, frantic, comic, but goodness nonetheless." Though the novel is obscured by unnecessary buttresses of Greek mythology, the portrait of Wesley Updike, in all its wonderful mania, sparkles with life. Wesley Updike is still mentioned in hushed tones in Shillington for his unpredictable teaching methods. One winter day, he suddenly dashed out of, his classroom in the middle of a lesson on decimals. Moments later, he reappeared with a handful of snow, raced to the blackboard, and triumphantly slammed the snowball against the spot decreed for the decimal point.

The Scandal. During the past few years, Ipswich has at last been taking over from Shillington as the prod to Updike's imagination, and his short stories have abandoned their boyhood themes and begun to examine the years of his maturity. Like Piet Hanema struggling to accept his God, Updike has suffered doubts of his own.

"I wouldn't want to pose as a religious thinker," he says. "I'm more or less a shady type improvising his way from book to book and trying to get up in the morning without a toothache. At one time I held very strongly the opinion that Paul Tillich and religious liberals like him were traitors in the theological camp because they were trying to humanize something that is essentially nonhuman. They were trying to make Christianity less than a scandal, as Kierkegaard called it. Well, it is a scandal; it's obviously a scandal because our life is a scandal."

Though he was raised a Unitarian amid the Lutherans and Amish of southeastern Pennsylvania, Updike joined the more middle-road Congregationalist Church in 1959. Then, a year later, as he was writing Rabbit, Run, the awareness of time passing pressed so closely on him that he felt a constant "sense of horror that beneath this skin of bright and exquisitely sculpted phenomena, death waits." It was a full-dress religious crisis lasting several months, and Updike says now that he got through it only by clinging to the stern, neo-orthodox theology of Switzerland's Karl Earth. In Earth's uncompromising view, reason can prove only that the nonexistence of God is absurd; the positive assertion, that God does exist, can come only by means of revelation.

Ten Points. The crisis has passed, or, more precisely, evolved, into a concern over the complexities of family life. "There's been a lot of sin committed in the name of the family," he says. "Sins on the children, sins of husband and wife to each other. I feel about the family as I do about the middle class, that it's somehow fiercer in there than has been assumed."

It has been fierce at times for John and Mary Updike. She is a strong, self-contained woman with the "firm ankles" of Updike heroines, and many of their friends believe that he could not survive without her. Do Updike's many stories of tension in marriage suggest experiences of his own? Says he: "My marriage, like many others, has had its intervals of deaths and renewals."

In the classic cliche, she is her husband's severest critic. "I can't think of one of my novels she's really liked," says Updike. "When she read The Poorhouse Fair, she said, 'Why do you want to write about all those old people? After The Centaur, she said, 'You can't understand all the mythology.' After Of the Farm, she said, 'Nothing happens.' And with Couples, she said she felt that she was being smothered in pubic hair. Actually I did take some of it out."

Updike devotes three hours a day to writing, occupying a cluttered room above a restaurant off the Ipswich green. At home, wearing tattered white sneakers, baggy pants, a turtleneck jersey and a shaggy haircut, he romps with his four children--Elizabeth, Michael, David and Miranda--or plays in a recorder group with Mary. On a winter morning, he might emerge from his 13-room white saltbox house, scoop up an armful of snow and heave ten decimal points against the stop sign on the corner. On a summer morning, he can go out to his small garden and properly cultivate a nice crop of lettuce. Almost any day he can get into his dented 1963 Corvair, drive down to Crane's Beach and walk in solitude or, at low tide, drive golf balls along the beach.

Clearly, Couples was not drawn entirely from his imagination. Tarbox, says Updike, is purely fictional, "with only a touch of the Ipswich marshes peeking through." Still, it is worth noting that the Updikes are the ringleaders of a group of like-minded couples whom the older Ipswichers call the Junior Jet Set. Updike has organized endless basketball, volleyball and touch-football games, led the jet set on skiing trips, and presided over countless intramural parties. Says one member of the set: "What we have evolved is a ritual. It sets up a rhythm where we are all available to each other. It's rather as if all of us belong to a family." Adds another friend without elaboration: "You can't sustain that very long without its being very destructive."

To Feel Evil. Updike heightens the historic parallels by writing into Piet many of his own identifying characteristics, from Dutch name to parlor gymnastics. "If John feels even slightly neglected at parties," says a friend, "he'll fall off the couch." In the novel, Foxy turns to Piet and says: "At first I thought you fell downstairs and did acrobatics to show off. But really, you do it to hurt yourself."

But in the end, the novel must make its way without reference to its gossip quotient, and Updike knows this better than anyone. "Jacques Maritain somewhere says that to write about evil a man needn't have done evil--only felt the evil within himself," Updike remarks. "If people want to make a different conclusion, fine. If the book has passion in it, it's my own. I would hope that at least I have the will to put things down the way they are, under the assumption that there's something beautiful about them in any case. I think a writer has no choice but to deliver what goods he has."

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