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The co-op bookstore for avid readers
Couples
Reader Score
71%
71% of readers
recommend this book
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
Book Details
- Publisher: Random House Publishing Group
- Publish Date: Aug 27th, 1996
- Pages: 576
- Language: English
- Edition: undefined - undefined
- Dimensions: 8.24in - 5.56in - 1.02in - 0.86lb
- EAN: 9780449911907
- Categories: • Literary• Psychological• Sagas
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About the Author
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What people are saying
#FreePalestine. Photo is Edward Said. China is not the enemy
@marxhaunting Have you read "Couples" by John Updike, Karl? It's about this
Jude Hopkins. Novel "Babe in the Woods" available now. Essays in Los Angeles Times, The Belladonna, other places, other times. https://t.co/rVDSC0Ufiy
"How innocently life ate the days" — John Updike, "Couples"
Five books. Written for @nytimes @wired @poetrymagazine + books with @softskull @BOAEditions future w/ @EccoBooks
@MistressSnowPhD @MaxMcAdams "Sundays are powerfucked" @TriciaLockwood once told me & that is, quite frankly, the truest statement, second only to "The book is bad" re: John Updike's novel COUPLES
Praise for this book
"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
"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