Where previously sex had been something seedy done by only the lower orders or the avant-garde, Updike opened the bedroom doors in an often curious blend of poetic and forensic detail and was both the architect for a new explicitness and the inspiration for the Bad Sex in Fiction prize, for which he was last year given a lifetime achievement award. Couples is often credited with bringing middle-class sex in all its graphic sliminess into mainstream literature. Set in the fictional Boston suburb of Tarbox in the early 1960s, Couples is about the collision of traditional Wasp sexual mores and the new liberal "post-pill paradise" as 10 married couples hop in and out of bed with each other.
The book that made Updike's reputation and got his face on the front cover of Time magazine when it was published. Here's a brief guide of what to read - and to avoid. But what is the average reader, who hasn't spent the last half-century closely following Updike's output, expected to make of his work? He was, unquestionably, a great stylist and a brilliant observer of the American middle-classes, in particular their sex lives, but like all writers - and whisper this softly because writers and publishers never like to be reminded of this - he was prone to the odd off day. It's what defined him and how he defined himself. And, yes, if you happened to have rooted through his garbage at some point, I dare say you would have found the odd advert sketched out.
From the time his first short story, Friends From Philadelphia, was bought by the New Yorker in 1954, until his death on Tuesday, Updike wrote nearly 30 novels, 14 volumes of short stories, nine of poetry and 10 collections of essays and criticism. John Updike once told the Paris Review: "I would write ads for deodorants or labels for catsup bottles if I had to" and he meant it. W rite three pages a day for more than 50 years and you end up with about 25m words - give or take a few million.
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