Marital Couples

The action of the novel takes place in a small American town in the sixties of the last century. Several couples, exhausted from boredom and idleness, find an escape in endless infidelities: Harold is married to Marcy and sleeps with... Janet, Frank is married to Janet and sleeps with Marcy, and Pait is married to Angela and sleeps… with everyone else. Updike's frankness can shock or provoke thought. After all, the lives of the characters closely resemble a game, charades, which they entertain themselves with every evening, and what may initially seem amusing gradually becomes frightening.

John Updike (1932-2009) is one of the most significant American writers of the second half of the 20th century, a novelist, poet, and literary critic, author of 23 novels and 45 other books: collections of short stories, poems, critical articles on literature and painting, and children's books. He was a recipient of many literary awards, including two Pulitzer Prizes (for the novels "Rabbit Is Rich" and "Rabbit Is Restless").
The novel "Marital Couples" confirms the author's reputation as one of the best stylists writing in English, capable of giving the dreary everyday life, as he himself expressed it, "the form of beauty it deserves".

A withered backwater town, withered backwater folk, going mad from idleness…
It seems that nothing is happening, but where does this terrible rupture suddenly come from, this scream that lingers in the ears for a long time…
"The New York Times Book Review"