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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