Authors: View from the Catacombs

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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