Adam and Eve in Connecticut

MORE CONSCIOUSLY, more deliberately than perhaps any other novelist in America today, John Updike creates characters whose private dramas mirror the dilemmas of their age. Intermittently they are reminded of the business of the world outside their own lives, of spaceshots and test ban treaties and civil rights confrontations. In the background of his novels, one hears the incessant soft humming of history.

Updike's latest book, Marry Me, is set in 1962, in pre-assassination America. As the protagonist suggests, it is "the twilight of the old morality, and there's just enough to torment us, and not enough to hold us in." The old confrontations--East vs. West, black vs. white--are reaching a head, and no one can know what the resolutions will be.

Jerry Conant, an ad-man in Greenwood, Connecticut, working on commercials to promote freedom in the Third World for the State Department, has grown morbidly fearful of death. Finding his wife Ruth provides him little comfort, he turns to the arms of a neighbor, Sally Mathias, who (as she represents it) is oppressed by her husband Richard. Their affair is heady, passionate, and now they are faced with the problem of resolving it--whether they will deny themselves their pleasure, or leave their respective spouses, and children for each other.

Updike subtitles the novel "a romance," an artistic sleight of hand by which he allows himself the generous introduction of coincidences. The resonances of the original romance, the Garden of Eden parable, are plentiful. Jerry is a sort of suburban Adam, hopelessly in love, tempted to make his passion public and thereby cross the threshold into the "new morality." Sally, for her part, reveals herself to be the bad Eve as the action progresses; essentially sinful, she demonstrates her greediness and her poison. Beneath her pious confessions of concern for the feelings and future of Ruth and her children, she is a sharp-nailed bitch with expensive and self-indulgent tastes, subtly pushing Jerry towards estrangement from his wife.

Nor, strangely enough, does Jerry's Adam appear very much more attractive. Rather he appears an extremely self-righteous innocent who believes that he can follow his heart and escape from his former life with Ruth unscathed. His litany to her is cowardly and irresponsible--don't hate me, he whines, be happy for me, don't make it difficult for me. His egocentricity gnaws at us, the egocentricity of a man attempting to retain his innocence while all those around him are losing theirs.

If there is a hero, it is Ruth, the only character whom we can admire. She goes through her ordeal bravely, trying to maintain her marriage, her family and her sanity, and succeeds to the point of knowing at the end that she doesn't really need the marriage at all. She is alone in her growth; the others stagnate or deteriorate. Jerry, unable to make his move out of Eden, dreams of proposing to Sally; Sally degenerates into a shrew; and Richard is doomed to perpetual unhappiness, neurotically in love with a woman who despises him.

Richard seems on the verge of becoming a whole character, but Updike never brings us beneath the surface. We see Richard acting out his resentments and passions, which he does with great theatrical flair, but his motivations remain cloudy, unpenetrated, and we're left feeling sorry for him without understanding why we should.

Whether Updike intends for us to be morally repulsed by the vacuity of Jerry's responses to his situation is not that important. What Updike can be held responsible for is the length and tedium of Jerry's odes to Sally. His sentimentality is so airy, so adolescent as to be painful. Perhaps this is precisely the frame of mind that Jerry is supposed to be in; or possibly Updike, after years of experience at depicting compulsive, cynical relationships, is incapable of conjuring an image of "wholesome" love.

"Oh," she said, "you wore a bathing suit."

"All the damn morning," he said, "and every time I felt the drawstring bite into my belly I thought, 'I'm going to see Sally. I'm going to see Sally in my bathing suit.' "

This sort of drivel, reminiscent of the most insipid moments in A Farewell to Arms, occupies too large a space, too central a place, in the structure of the novel.

On the other hand, the confrontation scenes--as when the two couples assemble to discuss their situation--are, as always in Updike, beautifully done. The action could have been dreamed up as a perfect exercise for Method actors--each character has some goal he/she is trying to achieve in opposition to the others, the dialogue subtly belying those ultimate aims. Not only are these scenes masterpieces of construction, they are aided by Updike's finely honed talent for observation. And so, for instance, when Jerry informs Ruth that he's decided to leave her, there are no long metaphysical speculations as to the state of her soul, but rather a recitation of the specific physical details of her reaction.

Jerry called plaintively, "Now don't start drinking!"

She poured the milk down the sink, rinsed out the glass, and placed it mouth down in the drainer. She checked if there were any crumbs on the counter to attract ants and, finding a few by the toaster, brushed them with one hand into the other, and down the sink, after the milk. With a wet washcloth she erased a smear of jam she had noticed near the toaster. She switched off the counter lights and said, "I'm not drinking. I'm going to bed."

As a whole the novel seems diffused, in a way that earlier works, like Rabbit Redux, did not. In Redux, the complexity of the protagonist was enough to sustain the unity of a plot which occasionally rambled. Rabbit's speculations on love, sex, and politics were by themselves disjointed, but interesting nonetheless because he seemed someone worth knowing.

Marry Me suffers from almost the exact opposite problem. The action is simple and complete, but with no one to hold it together. Its hero's plight is neither real enough to attract our sympathies, nor is his method of dealing with it courageous enough to merit our admiration. As a novel, Marry Me fails; but with some paring, it's a property Lee Strasberg might be interested in.