Volume 10, Number 7 · April 11, 1968
Cock-a-doodle-doo
By William H. Gass
Couples
by John Updike
Knopf, 485 pp., $6.95
The couples live in Tarbox. Come. It is in places marshy. There are trees, lawns of fine description, bodies, houses like them, banks of purply flowered scenes, courts for games, arousing speeches, and the groaning culminations of many amorous machines. That's because the principal industry in Tarbox is fucking. They think of it, Elizabethanly, as dying, in Tarbox; descents to hell, indeed, are taken every day—through wood-dark poetries unwarily entered by the middleaged. No one dies in Tarbox of too little. Not only the place but the people bear distinguishing names. The heroine is called Foxy by her friends; a dentist whose tongue is like a dental pick (the souls in Tarbox have teeth) is named Thorne, his wife, Georgene; the heedless hero (always in dutch) is Piet Hanema; the pairs most set on swapping are blended prettily together as the Applesmiths. It is a fortunate thing that a family of sheep didn't stray into town, the combinations might have proved too distracting, especially since this novel is clearly the suburbanite entry in the porno pageant, and I suspect such softloaf sophisticates do not delight in the truly unusual: mulogeny or grampalingus, for instance, meatusfoetus or intermissolonghi. Conversant with the modern texts of sexual hygiene, every reader can redream the acts he reads quite guiltlessly. The obscene, sometimes, can even set a standard. Tarbox sex is often oral, but that's the way with writers; the penis was never Nature's purposed instrument of speech.
Review, 1553 words
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