Plot
Much of the plot of Couples (which opens on the evening of March 24, 1962 and integrates historical events like the loss of the USS Thresher on April 10, 1963 and the Kennedy assassination in November 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."
The book is rich in period detail. (In 2009, USA Today called the novel a "time capsule of the era.) The lyrical and explicit descriptions of sex, unusual for the time, made the book somewhat notorious. TIME magazine had reserved a cover story for Updike and the novel before knowing what it was about; after actually reading it they got embarrassed and discovered that "the higher up it went in the Time hierarchy, the less they liked it."
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