March's Selection of Amorous Books

Maybe it was The Guy being away, but I inadvertently chose two rather amorous books to read back to back this month…

Couples by John Updike
This was a rather hard title to track down. I remember it being referenced once and put it on my to-read list, but hadn’t come across it in bookstores or libraries, and finally it came up on my Book Mooch list. The copy that came to me was from 1969 – and the book is definitely reminiscent of that age. We’ve memorialized the late sixties now into a cliché, but I’ve wondered before what it felt like at the time. And especially, what it felt like for those average folks that weren’t at Woodstock or weren’t protesting. And I imagine the tone (if not the content) helps portray exactly what it felt like. Excitement and intrigue, but also an air of purposelessness and meaninglessness. The book is about 10 married couples (so many characters to keep up with that I’m having trouble powering through) living in eastern Massachusetts, who are all sleeping with each other and suspecting each other of sleeping with each other constantly, which Updike represents as no more than an “imaginative quest”. It’s been fascinating to read, although not particularly moving.

On Chesil Beach by Ian McEwan
The painfully tender account of a virginal British couple on their wedding night. I love McEwan and I love this type of writing = the type of writing which reaffirms what we as humans know – that there are always a million flashes of emotion and lack of emotion and meaning and insanity behind each day’s mundane moments. Or, another way, there is always more – always more to it than we think. But this book is so short, so quick a read, that you feel the painfulness of their stories more than you feel the rich emotional reward for having gone through it with them.