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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