Couples, John Updike
Couples, John Updike
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Couples

Author: John Updike

Narrator: Ari Fliakos

Unabridged: 18 hr 42 min

Format: Digital Audiobook Download

Published: 02/04/2020

Synopsis

The provocative novel about sex in suburbia, striking in its complete sexual frankness and rightly praised as an artful, seductive, savagely graphic portrayal of love, marriage and adultery in America.

About The Author

JOHN UPDIKE was born in Shillington, Pennsylvania, in 1932. He graduated from Harvard College in 1954 and spent a year in Oxford, England, at the Ruskin School of Drawing and Fine Art. From 1955 to 1957 he was a member of the staff of The New Yorker. His novels have won the Pulitzer Prize, the National Book Award, the National Book Critics Circle Award, the Rosenthal Foundation Award, and the William Dean Howells Medal. In 2007 he received the Gold Medal for Fiction from the American Academy of Arts and Letters. John Updike died in January 2009.

Reviews

Goodreads review by Vit on August 16, 2024

These days Couples is mostly interesting for revealing the atmosphere of the time and the manners of the period it takes place in. “Thou shalt not commit adultery” – Exodus 20:14.  But days in a small town are empty and everyone needs something to fill the hole in one’s day-to-day living. So adultery......more

Goodreads review by Katie on February 22, 2019

You know when a guilty man sets about justifying his behaviour, how he strives for big philosophical words and at the same time to bring all his charm to the fore to justify the petty thing he did? Well, this entire novel is a bit like that. It's about ten couples in suburban America in the 1960s. I......more

Goodreads review by Michael on November 16, 2016

Nobody writes about infidelity quite as good as Updike. Well, Roth sometimes gets close, but particularly in Couples, the disintegration of the various couples in the small New England town is described with painful realism by John Updike. Each character is fully developed and is sometimes endearing......more

Goodreads review by brian on February 17, 2009

one reads a lot of this about updike: “it’s really well written, but…”, “the prose soars, but…”, “the writing was great, but…” you don’t see a lot of this regarding vincent van gogh: “it’s really well painted, but…”, “the brush strokes are nice but… isn’t he just painting a flower? or some wheat? or......more

Quotes

“Couples [is] John Updike’s tour de force of extramarital wanderlust.”—The New York Times Book Review
 
“Trapped in their cozy catacombs, the couples have made sex by turns their toy, their glue, their trauma, their therapy, their hope, their frustration, their revenge, their narcotic, their main line of communication and their sole and pitiable shield against the awareness of death.”—Time
 
“Ingenious . . . If this is a dirty book, I don’t see how sex can be written about at all.”—Wilfrid Sheed, The New York Times Book Review

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