Couples
Condition: SECONDHAND
This is a secondhand book. The jacket image is a photograph of the exact copy we have in stock. This image shows the condition of this book. Further condition remarks are below.
Condition remarks:
Book: Good
Jacket: Wear and tear with damage
Pages: Yellowed
Beneath the manicured lawns and dinner-party facades of Tarbox, Massachusetts, ten affluent couples are quietly unravelling — and John Updike's Couples chronicles their interlocking desires, betrayals, and moral compromises with unflinching precision. At the centre of this suburban constellation stands Piet Hanema, a Dutch-born architect and restorer of old houses, whose passionate affair with the younger Foxy Whitman ignites a chain of consequences that threatens to consume the entire social order he and his friends have so carefully constructed. Set against the charged backdrop of the early 1960s — from the Kennedy era to its shattering end — the novel presents a community that has replaced religious faith with the erotic, transforming adultery into ritual and weekend parties into sacrament. Updike writes with a sensuousness and architectural exactitude that renders every surface — a weathered clapboard, a naked shoulder, a freshly poured cocktail — luminous with meaning. Couples stands as one of the defining American novels of the post-war era, arguing that beneath the prosperity and permissiveness of the age lay a profound spiritual vacancy. Updike's prose, lyrical yet ruthlessly observant, elevates what might seem like a chronicle of infidelity into a meditation on mortality, community, and the ceaseless human hunger for transcendence — leaving the reader to wonder whether any of these beautiful, broken people were ever truly saved.
Author: John Updike
Format: Hardback
Genre: Modern fiction
Condition remarks:
Book: Good
Jacket: Wear and tear with damage
Pages: Yellowed
Beneath the manicured lawns and dinner-party facades of Tarbox, Massachusetts, ten affluent couples are quietly unravelling — and John Updike's Couples chronicles their interlocking desires, betrayals, and moral compromises with unflinching precision. At the centre of this suburban constellation stands Piet Hanema, a Dutch-born architect and restorer of old houses, whose passionate affair with the younger Foxy Whitman ignites a chain of consequences that threatens to consume the entire social order he and his friends have so carefully constructed. Set against the charged backdrop of the early 1960s — from the Kennedy era to its shattering end — the novel presents a community that has replaced religious faith with the erotic, transforming adultery into ritual and weekend parties into sacrament. Updike writes with a sensuousness and architectural exactitude that renders every surface — a weathered clapboard, a naked shoulder, a freshly poured cocktail — luminous with meaning. Couples stands as one of the defining American novels of the post-war era, arguing that beneath the prosperity and permissiveness of the age lay a profound spiritual vacancy. Updike's prose, lyrical yet ruthlessly observant, elevates what might seem like a chronicle of infidelity into a meditation on mortality, community, and the ceaseless human hunger for transcendence — leaving the reader to wonder whether any of these beautiful, broken people were ever truly saved.