Description
Set against the shifting moral weather of early-1960s America, this novel follows a circle of couples as they try to reconcile Protestant restraint with the era’s loosening attitudes toward sex. Over the course of dinner parties, betrayals, and private reckonings, characters navigate desire, guilt, and self-justification while public events—from political scandal to national tragedy—echo through their intimate lives. With Updike’s famously lyrical, unsparing prose, the book turns marriage into a kind of modern purgatory: not defined by a lack of feeling, but by the struggle to find meaning when faith and certainty seem to recede. At its core, it’s a study of love’s negotiations—how people bargain with conscience, with time, and with the body—when the rules they inherited no longer hold.
Available Editions
paperback
Random House Trade Paperbacks
Published Aug 27, 1996
577 pages
ISBN: 9780449911907
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Details
First Published
1968
Language
eng
Content Warnings
Content and trigger warnings for Couples by John Updike.