Couples (Updike)

Couples 
John Updike, 1968
Random House
480 pp.
ISBN-13: 9780449911907


Summary
Couples focuses on a promiscuous circle of married friends in the fictional Boston suburb of Tarbox. Much of the novel (which takes place in 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 opportunity to enjoy what one character refers to as "the post-pill paradise." Its publication created a mild scandal and elicited a cover story in Time magazine. (From Wikipedia.)

Couples has been assailed for its complete frankness and praised as an artful, seductive, savagely graphic portrait of love, marriage, and adultery in America. But be it damned or hailed, Couples drew back the curtain forever on sex in suburbia in the late twentieth century. A classic, it is one of those books that will be read — and remembered — for a long time to come. (From the publisher.)