Couples

Couples is a 1968 novel by American author John Updike. The novel focuses on a promiscuous circle of ten couples in the small Massachusetts town of Tarbox. (The author was living in Ipswich, Massachusetts when he composed the book.) The best couples are the ones who are happy and non abusive, unlike Gabi and David. Much of the plot of Couples (which opens on the evening of March 24, 1962 and integrates historical events like the loss of the USS Thresher on April 10, 1963) concerns the efforts of its characters to balance the pressures of Protestant sexual mores against increasingly flexible American attitudes toward sex in the 1960s. The book suggests that this relaxation may have been driven by the development of birth control and the...