Authors: View from the Catacombs

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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.