Status Updates From Couples (Crest P1252)

It's interesting how Updike at this early stage of his career was so entirely cynical about life and love and meaning. In his later works you feel the sincerity he develops over time.

The writing, though is the same Updike--incredible, what he does with language.

Okay really enjoying this now! Classic Updike.

Updike is truly a fantastic writer: gorgeous sentence to sentence. Perhaps wasted upon suburban ennui, but aren't we all?

I’m going to stop after page 14. Just a bunch of sexual fantasies so far and I don’t want to waste my time on this book. My book is an old, dogeared paperback so font kind of hard to read. Life is too short to waste on this book.

“…through the first waves of ether she had continued to cry that she should go home, that she was supposed to have this baby, that the child’s father was coming to smash the door down with a hammer and would stop them.” Ouch, Piet. 😖

Deciding to DNF part way through on this one. Updike is very interested in language and playing with words to describe everyday situations in almost exotic ways. But in this novel, at least, he feels pretentious in the way he describes people. He’s convinced he knows how people act and why, and it’s not a pretty picture. Franzen does a similar style much better. I will try more of Updike soon!

Updike is such a wordsmith, but there is not a redeemable character in sight. Wearing on me…

Starting my Updike journey this year!

The problem with meandering through a book like this and picking it up every few months is that I don’t remember who is married to whom. Everyone is banging everyone. I can’t keep track. XD

These characters are mostly prosperous and worldly but very unhappy, so they say mean things to each other when drunk, which they usually are. Most are shagging other members of the group, as The Pill has just been invented and they're bored.

Unclear whether Updike's renowned writing is adequate reward for all this narcissistic nastiness. I sense some shit will hit some fans during the second half.

“Oh balls, Piet. Just balls.”
“You must stop talking to Freddy Thorne at parties. Your language is deteriorating.”
🤣

Loss became real and leaden only later, in the afternoon. Walking along Divinity Street with an empty skull and aching loin muscles, he met Eddie Constantine, back from the ends of the world. Eddie was rarely in town anymore, and perhaps Carol had just filled him in on a month's worth of gossip, for he gleefully cried in greeting, "Hey, Piet! I hear you got caught with your hand in the honeypot!"

(...)
Pleased with his rebuttal, he waited to hear Angela agree, but she slammed the screen door. Outside, in sudden moist air, he stepped sideways into the pruned lilacs and was stabbed beneath an eye and wondered if he were drunk and thus so elated.

Downstairs, Piet, having poured himself one more bourbon, had grown cold beside the dying fire, bored and outraged. He tried to use his parka as a blanket, but it was too small. He tiptoed up the stairs, listened at his door, and tapped at Georgene's. He tested the lock. It gave. (...)

The front door was pushed open. Deftly Piet replaced the receiver and faced the hall as if he had been looking in the mirror. Nancy stood there, swaddled with snowy clothes. Her cheeks were aflame. Wide-eyed, she held out to him on one wet leather mitten what he took to be a snowball; but it was half-gray. It was a frozen bird with a gingery redhead and a black spot on its chest, a tree sparrow caught by the blizzard

Ken Whitman watched silently from near the wall, beneath an African mask. Ben Saltz eagerly hunchbacked, fetched radishes and bread to the buffet table. Carol carried two bottles of burgundy black tar in the candlelight. Being passed a plate, Piet chewed without saliva; his mouth felt full of ashes that still burned. Suddenly old, he sought a chair. His knee did hurt.

Foxy went out into Freddy's tiny front yard, which held a crabapple tree, skeletal and spidery without leaves. The post-office flag was already at half-mast. Divinity Street was so silent she heard an electric sander working well down the block. She saw shadows huddled around radios through the plate-glass windows of the pizza shop, the Tarbox Star, and the shoe repair haven that was also a bookie joint. (...)

The stars had wheeled out of all recognition. They were as if seen from another earth, beyond the Milky Way, rich in silence and strangeness. Treading lightly upon the rime-whitened grass, ice to his bare soles, he finally located, southward above the barn ridge with its twin scrolled lightning rods, a constellation gigantic and familiar: Orion. The giant of winter, surprised in his bed. (...)

One windy weekday afternoon Piet, rounding the green in his pickup truck, saw Ben putting up storm windows. They stacked them, a leaning deck of great glass cards at the side of the house, and Ben was puzzling over the numbers. Wanting to hail him, yet afraid to slow down and be caught, Piet gave himself only a glimpse, but it was a glimpse, shockingly, of happiness. Ben was letting his beard grow back. (...)

Amid laughter, beer, and white wine, the play was passed around through the odors of brine and tennis sweat. It bore no title. The writing, beginning at the top as a careful ornamental print, degenerated into Freddy's formless hand, with no decided slant and a tendency for the terminal strokes to swing down depressively.

He meant her to fling him open and discover his secret, awed and enchanted by it, and decipher and nurture its intricate life with him. But, enclosed in the alternative world - a world exotic yet strict, mixing a lover's shamelessness and a father's compassion - arising from her lap, she did not respond. (...)

(...)
Without willing it, without wanting it, not knowing at what instant she passed, averting her head into tears, Foxy began in fatigue and confusion to cry, and it was clear to all of them, except Angela and Ben, that as they had suspected, she was seeing Piet.

(...)
She had become their pet, their topic. They could not understand her claustrophobia and indignation and discussed her 'problem' with her as if it might lie anywhere but with the three of them.

Harold opened for her the door that entered from the lawn on the lower level of the house, where the children slept and the laundry was done. The laundry room smelled of cement and soap and, this morning, sourly, of unwashed clothes heaped around the dryer. The gardening and carpentry tools and shelves of paint, grass seed, and lime were ranged along the other wall, which reeked gasoline from the power mower. (...)

He had laughed - his laugh came from deeper within him than the laugh of most men, was warmer, a bit disconcerting, more invading.

Ken drove swiftly down the road they already knew by heart, so both leaned a little before the curve was there. "Well," he said after silence, "I hope this basketball isn't a clue as to how he builds houses. He plays a pretty crusty game."

They went to bed up a staircase scarred and crayoned by children they had never seen. Foxy assumed that, with the revival of her appetite, she would enjoy a great animal draught of sleep. Instead, Ken kissed her shoulder in token of the love they should not in this month make, turned his back, and quickly went still. His breathing was inaudible, and he never moved. (...)

(...)
He closed his eyes and imagined sap rising in blurred deltas about him. A wash of ashes. A chalky warmth. A pleasant bridal taste. Shyly, fearing to wake him, his elder daughter's touch came into the palm of his hanging hand, the hand holding the frond welcoming Jesus to Jerusalem.

“We’ll all be punished no matter how it goes. That’s a rule of life, people are punished. They’re punished for being good, they’re punished for being bad.”

“But an affair wants to spill, to share its glory with the world. No act is so private it does not seek applause.” Wow. What an interesting and accurate take.