Reception
The novel was widely and enthusiastically reviewed, landing Updike on the cover of Time, a rare location for an author. Time, while detailing similarities between real Ipswich and fictional Tarbox ("it is worth noting that the Updikes are the ringleaders of a group of like-minded couples whom the older Ipswichers call the Junior Jet Set. Updike has organized endless basketball, volleyball and touch-football games, led the jet set on skiing trips, and presided over countless intramural parties. Says one member of the set: 'What we have evolved is a ritual. It sets up a rhythm where we are all available to each other. It's rather as if all of us belong to a family.' Adds another friend without elaboration: 'You can't sustain that very long without its being very destructive'"), called the book "sensational." Critic and novelist Wilfred Sheed, in the New York Times Book Review, found Couples "ingenious" and "scorching...the games are described with loving horror." Addressing of the novel's famous frankness about sexual manners, Sheed wrote, "If this is a dirty book, I don't see how sex can be written about at all. Updike's treatment of sex is central to his method, which is that of a fictional biochemist approaching mankind with a tray of hypersensitive gadgets."
More recently, Martin Amis dismissed Couples as one of the author's lesser works.
Read more about this topic: Couples
Famous quotes containing the word reception:
“To the United States the Third World often takes the form of a black woman who has been made pregnant in a moment of passion and who shows up one day in the reception room on the forty-ninth floor threatening to make a scene. The lawyers pay the woman off; sometimes uniformed guards accompany her to the elevators.”
—Lewis H. Lapham (b. 1935)
“He’s leaving Germany by special request of the Nazi government. First he sends a dispatch about Danzig and how 10,000 German tourists are pouring into the city every day with butterfly nets in their hands and submachine guns in their knapsacks. They warn him right then. What does he do next? Goes to a reception at von Ribbentropf’s and keeps yelling for gefilte fish!”
—Billy Wilder (b. 1906)
“Aesthetic emotion puts man in a state favorable to the reception of erotic emotion.... Art is the accomplice of love. Take love away and there is no longer art.”
—Rémy De Gourmont (1858–1915)