Desperate coupling

Fiction: John Updike's 21st novel offers too few glimpses of his genius at work

Owen Mackenzie considers his life. Now retired and living in a compact Massachusetts community with his second wife, Julia, he is not exactly content - more like resigned to the business of waking each morning. This is not surprising. Owen, not the most interesting of men, has more than his share of ghosts and too much free time to remember them.

John Updike's 21st novel is a bit of an oddity, familiar, uncomfortably harsh and, at times, rather terrifying. There is also the niggling suspicion that for much of the narrative Updike appears content to revisit Couples (1968), his novel that summed up the 1960s and duly became the classic text of middle-class adultery. This time, however, all the urgency and comedy are gone as the narrative tracks Owen through his lengthy career as the unfaithful husband of the remote, enigmatic Phyllis.

Together they manage to produce four children on relatively little physical contact. Updike's descriptions of the young Phyllis, a maths major and daughter of an English professor, are among the convincing passages he has written about a woman. But then Updike is a master of the physical, he brings his artist's eye to it and makes the imagined live.

It is Phyllis, born into an academic family, who could "produce an academic frown, a mental sniff of disapproval" and announces early in their marriage: "I love what's pure and useless." In need of a perfect husband "or else she has made a life-long mistake", she is a disciplined, albeit self-contained idealist who emerges as the only quasi-likeable person in a novel populated by misfits, most of whom never amount to more than clones of characters from previous Updike works. She is also the truth teller in what proves to be a tough, edgy book about lies and lying, most specifically to oneself.

But Updike has not made it easy for himself or his reader. Villages is about one man's sex life, but more than that, it is also a book about sex, most of which is calculated and unloving. Women approach clever, dreamy, compliant Owen and he obliges. It is difficult to take his half-hearted questing all that seriously.

Serving as a backdrop of sorts to Owen's various affairs is the changing face of US society. History provides Updike with a useful device for marking the years. There are also frequent updates as to the advances in computer technology achieved by Owen and Ed, his junk food-gorging business partner. Early in the novel he fleshes out Owen's background. As an only child, he had been raised in the company of all-protecting adults. His life was also shaped by indulgence. As a boy he had "rolled over and gone back to sleep, letting the world's torrents of pain wash over him".

When his father had to take a job at a distance from home, it meant "Owen was left with his grandparents, his mother, a barnful of cats with runny eyes, and two fluffy collie puppies. The nearest neighbours were Mennonites, whose children had no time for play: they all worked on their farm . . . Owen stayed in the house and read science fiction and mystery novels set in English villages and dreamed of far-fetched inventions that would make him rich."

Adult life duly delivers. Owen never really had to grow up.

Aside from the ongoing sexual intrigue, the narrative's other and far more subtle major theme is that of loneliness. The sex, which is portrayed as ridiculous, acquires an element of desperation; it is also tacky, sleazy and, for Updike, curiously non-erotic.

Each woman Owen sleeps with offers yet another variation on the theme of sex as a way of dealing with boredom, frustration and failure. "Alissa, too, was a frustrated artist - at least, she made love to Owen as if each time had to be a masterpiece . . . the hand of hers not half in her mouth beat on Owen's back like a panicked wing."

With frank, masculine Vanessa, he discovers "a certain serious playfulness; like a man, she was willing to consider the event basically physical, a meal of sorts, and, like a good cook, was conscious of the need for variety". Their conservations are cynical and knowing. Within moments of Vanessa propositioning, Owen watches his "tall, long-necked wife dancing with Vanessa's hunched-over, rhythmless husband" and notices "Phyllis was gazing stoically over Henry's head. Heaven knew what she was thinking".

Having methodically betrayed Phyllis, Owen meets his destiny in Julia, wife of the "Reverend Mister Arthur Larson". Julia is decisive, and divorces first, leaving Owen to follow. It is only in the closing sequences of this novel with its many echoes of earlier and superior Updike narratives, that the master of human folly takes control. The final conversation between Owen and Phyllis - "they stood there hip-deep in ghosts" - is the finest sequence in the book.

Central to its drama is the wife's eloquent intelligence. Offering to dismiss her divorce lawyer, she promises to save the situation. "I've invested too much misery in this marriage, too much humiliation." No one could predict what happens next.

Although Villages at best merely offers glances of the best of John Updike, in addition to reprising Couples, there are echoes of far more significant books, such as Roger's Version (1986), which explores one man's relationship with God and science, and the meditative elegy, Toward the End of Time (1997), one of his finest works and itself a superior handling of the themes of this new book.

The concluding pages of Villages do extract some saving philosophical weight, if not enough. As ever, Updike is concerned with God and guilt, life and love. Sure, this is a book about sex. More importantly, though, it is about desperate, messy coupling as a shaky sanctuary for the lost and dying who somehow never figured out how to live - only Updike has done this before, and far more impressively.

Eileen Battersby is Literary Correspondent of The Irish Times

Villages by John Updike Hamish Hamilton, 321pp. £17.99