John Updike just might be the sexual revolution's most meticulous chronicler. With novels such as Rabbit, Run, Marry Me and Couples, he provided graphic, as-it-happened portraits of the unzipped era between the introduction of the Pill and the advent of Aids. At a time when sex was seen as a liberating adventure, Updike plunged fearlessly into the carnal wilderness, detailing every grope and mapping every genital with unblinking exactitude.
Villages, Updike's 21st novel, revisits this fertile territory, although this time it feels more like bitter-sweet nostalgia than a fresh report from between the sheets. The story opens in the present day, with 70-year-old Owen Mackenzie and his second wife, Julia, having settled into a somewhat reluctant retirement in the upscale Massachusetts village of Haskells Crossing. The couple crankily negotiate their slide into dotage with "senility-fending manoeuvre[s]" such as exotic foreign travel and a "lovestricken fidgeting" that passes for sex. Although the children by their various marriages are long gone, they "live with another presence in the house, their approaching deaths".
From this precarious vantage point, Owen looks back on the other villages he has inhabited, starting with his boyhood town of Willow, Pennsylvania. Although it was a place closer in temperament to the 19th century than the 20th, the town was not without its seamy underside, first encountered by Owen in the form of a spent condom glimpsed while walking with his parents. Entering adolescence, "he discovered more places in Willow where sin cast its shadow, which did not slide away like most shadows but had a sticky, pungent quality". His voyage into this netherworld culminates in some very heavy petting with Elsie, who with each date "gave him an inch or two more of herself that he could claim as his henceforth".
Actual loss of virginity must wait until he goes off to college at MIT and meets Phyllis, who becomes his first wife. She is a brilliant maths student, rare in Eisenhower's America, where "women bred as if supplying a frontier, in that era of pioneer consumerism". Their wedding night is described with characteristic frankness: "he knelt between her legs and combed her luxuriant pussy, now his, as if preparing a fleecy lamb for sacrifice, until she irritably took the comb from his hand and tossed it away from the bed . . ."
When Owen decides to start his own computer software firm, the couple move to the evocatively named Connecticut village of Middle Falls. Phyllis abandons her dreams of a career to raise a family, while Owen builds the business that will make him rich. Mostly, however, he concentrates on getting into the sexual swing of the Sixties, which involves sleeping with as many of his neighbours' wives as possible. "Two kinds of women existed in the world, Owen perceived: those with whom you have slept and those, a cruelly disproportionate but reducible number, with whom you haven't."
The aged Owen recalls each of his partners in exact anatomical detail. There is Faye, whose "pubic hair was scanter than Phyllis's; two gauzy waves met in a coppery crest down the middle of her mount". Or Alissa: "his prick in her mouth, she would go into a trance, repetitively nodding like one of those drinking birds you fitted to the edge of a water glass". Even the women he doesn't bed lodge in his randy imagination, like his partner's wife as she emerges from skinny-dipping and "Owen would see her pubic triangle dripping from a point like a wet goatee between her skinny thighs".
The Seventies arrive and things get even juicier - "the path to illicit sex had grown shorter; the skids were greased". Owen eschews the women of Middle Falls for younger, unabashedly liberated girls with names such as Jacqueline, Antoinette and Mirabella. Phyllis puts up with all of this, perhaps because she understands that she doesn't meet Owen's hypercharged needs, though one also suspects that Updike does not spend very much time thinking about her motivation at all. The marriage ends when Owen falls for Julia, the local pastor's wife. As the Reagan era arrives and America retreats back into its uneasy blend of private pornography and public puritanism, Owen and Julia settle into the monogamy that brings them to their final village.
While the tone of Villages may be valedictory, it still makes for a sprightly read. Updike's prose remains as supple as ever, and his grinning disregard for the grammar of political correctness is a welcome tonic. That said, readers who came of age after Gerald Ford's presidency might find Owen a bit harder to swallow than the women of Middle Falls ever did. There is something vaguely monstrous about him. He occupies an utterly eroticised space where everything - work, children, politics, culture - is filtered through the prism of his own sexual needs.
Updike provides plenty of detail about Owen's work in the early days of the computer revolution, though it is rendered with such rote indifference that it is impossible to digest. Owen and Phyllis raise four kids, though they stay considerately off-stage for almost the entire novel. Even Owen's harem of willing housewives remains hard to fathom behind all that pubic hair and bourbon.
What remains is our hero, rutting his way towards a tenuous wisdom. Was his behaviour "a magical exploration of his male nature", or something darker and more destructive? "Picturing himself in Middle Falls, he cannot imagine what drove him into so many hazardous passes and contorted positions: he was a puppet whose strings old age has snipped." The best answer the elderly Owen can conjure is that sex "is a programmed delirium that rolls back death". This may be true, though one closes the book suspecting that the explanation is nothing more than the rationalisation of an old man who still cannot believe his good fortune to have lived in a time when sex really was as easy as a handshake.
Stephen Amidon's Human Capital is published by Viking this month
