Marry Me

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 the pleasure, or leave their respective spouses and children for each other.

The action in Marry Me 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.