Turn, Turn, Turn

PUBLISHED IN 1968, John Updike's Couples appeared in print only one year before the Woodstock Music and Art Fair of 1969, a quintessential moment in the life span of the peace and love generation. Though the novel's action is set in the years 1962 and 1963, it met readers at a point in American social history when hippie culture and its various manifestos, such as “If it feels good, do it” and “Love the one you're with” were affecting the national mindset. The idea of “finding oneself” gained traction even in bourgeois society, as it too began to countenance personal and sexual permissiveness. These changes were, of course, hastened by the women's liberation movement and the attendant introduction of freely available oral contraceptives. The most frequently quoted line from Couples, set in affluent New England exurbia, is “welcome to the post-pill paradise” (C, 63).

A decade later, though, counterarguments to the counterculture were in wide circulation, perhaps most famously advanced in M. Scott Peck's (1978) best-selling self-help book The Road Less Traveled, which advocated delayed gratification in the service of love. Love, Peck maintained, is not a feeling but an action. It requires discipline and the acceptance of responsibility. It sometimes involves the renunciation of personal pleasure. His book went on to sell more than 10 million copies. Clearly, just ten years after John Updike published Couples, and eleven years after the sweeping bohemianism of 1967 (dubbed the Summer of Love), growing segments of the American public were contemplating an ethics of restraint.

Updike's novel, however, is fortuitously set early enough in the 1960s to preclude its characters sufficient twentieth-century societal preced for sexually hedonistic behavior, never mind its aftermath. Its fictional events begin some five years before hippie culture gained much sway and long before it yielded to the more conservative but no less self-serving phenomenon that came to be called yuppie culture, “yuppie” being an acronym for the young, urban professionals of the early 1980s.