Couples was published by Alfred A. Knopf, New York, on 8 April 1968, in a first printing of approximately 60,000 copies priced at $6.95. It was Updike’s first genuine bestseller, spending months on the New York Times list and selling over 400,000 copies in hardcover. Time magazine put Updike on its cover with the headline “The Adulterous Society.” The novel made him famous beyond the literary world — and made him controversial in ways that would shadow his reputation for decades.
The Novel
Tarbox, Massachusetts, is a fictional New England town populated by young professionals: architects, dentists, scientists, builders. Ten couples form an interconnected social set, and the novel traces the sexual permutations among them with Updike’s characteristic precision. The central figure is Piet Hanema, a Dutch-American builder — sensual, religious, guilty — who is carrying on affairs with two women simultaneously while his marriage to Angela frays.
The novel’s structure is deliberately communal: no single plot drives the narrative, but rather a web of entanglements, jealousies, confessions, and recriminations. The couples meet at dinner parties, on tennis courts, at the beach. They swap partners with an openness that scandalized 1968 readers and now reads as a prescient diagnosis of the sexual revolution’s trajectory.
Updike’s real subject, characteristically, is not sex but theology. Piet is the only character who still attends church, still feels the pull of transcendence. The novel’s governing metaphor is the death of God — specifically, the burning of the Tarbox Congregational Church in the novel’s climactic scene. When the church burns, the social structure built around its absence (the couples’ hedonism serving as a substitute religion) collapses too.
Critical Reception
The critical response was fierce and divided. Wilfrid Sheed in the New York Times praised it as “Updike’s best novel”; Elizabeth Hardwick savaged it; Norman Mailer called the sex scenes evidence that Updike was “the first major writer to take any flak from women’s liberation.” The sexual explicitness was extreme for a novel published by a major house in 1968 — Updike describes acts that most literary fiction of the period only gestured toward.
The novel’s reputation has fluctuated. Through the 1970s and 1980s it was often dismissed as a period piece. More recently, critics have returned to it as a serious work of social realism — one of the few American novels to capture, from the inside, the texture of upper-middle-class life in the Kennedy-Johnson era.
Collecting Couples
First edition (1968, Knopf): Large first printing (~60,000), $6.95.
Identification points:
- “FIRST EDITION” on copyright page
- Mustard-yellow cloth binding
- Dust jacket price $6.95
Approximate market values:
- Fine/Fine in dust jacket: $200–$600
- Signed first edition: $500–$1,500
- Without jacket: $30–$75
Value trajectory: The large first printing keeps values moderate. However, association copies and copies with significant inscriptions command premiums. This is a title where condition and provenance matter more than scarcity. Updike’s death in 2009 did not significantly move prices for Couples the way it did for the Rabbit novels.
What Made Couples So Scandalous?
By contemporary standards, the sexual content is tame. What shocked readers in 1968 was not the acts described but the milieu: these were not bohemians or beatniks but respectable suburban professionals — the kind of people who read Updike. The novel held a mirror to its own audience and said: this is what you are doing. That reflexive quality gave it its power and its notoriety.