Life in Tarbox according to John Updike.

I wrote on 27 July that by the 1960s Grace Metalious’s Peyton Place would be old hat, superseded by a new brace of copycat writers who would turbo-charge the prurience level to an alarming new velocity, a kind of mile-high club of novelists.

Then along came John Updike, with Couples, a fictional expose of ten married pairs in a town called Tarbox, published in 1968. There was plenty of turbo-charging; it fills the book, but it is not the subject of the book. In any case ‘subject’ is too mundane a word to describe what a book is about. Updike launches into a reinvention of language that psychoanalyses not just people but actual things using Joyce-like prose that takes storytelling into a stratospheric form of new journalism crossed with transcendental stream-of-consciousness. It’s that good. Or bad. For me, it made Couples easily one of the top ten books I’ve read. (Apologies to the late Mr. Updike if that sounds patronising, which it does very much.) Aspiring novelists should read Updike and note the complete absence of cliche, or peer-approved plot or language conventions, or plodding obviousness. 

More on Couples later. 

Plot giveaway: they get married.