Volume 24, Number 1 · February 3, 1977
Couples
By Karl Miller
Marry Me
by John Updike
Knopf, 320 pp., $7.95
Torch Song
by Anne Roiphe
Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 226 pp., $8.95
A Girl in Winter
by Philip Larkin
Overlook Press, 248 pp., $8.95
In one of his collection of Picked-Up Pieces, John Updike suggests that the old novel depended on the old morality which praised God and forbade sexual intercourse outside marriage. Then, when the prohibition of 'free-ranging sex' began to fail, the old intricate and heavy plots suffered a sympathetic impotence. His new novel, Marry Me, might appear to have been designed to take account of such developments: lightly plotted, a tale rather than a novel, it is acted out by a cast of middle-class loose-livers. The adulterers of Greenwood, Connecticut, include Jerry and Sally, who are also 'exaggerators,' and their respective partners in marriage, Ruth and Richard, who are more level-headed and more truthful.
Review, 4037 words
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