A novel so controversial upon its release that it scored Updike the cover of TIME magazine, Couples remains one of his best-selling works. Arriving a year after the Summer of Love, the novel takes a look at a group of couples in the small Massachusetts town of Tarbox who can’t help but sleep with each other in various combinations. As TIME wrote, such rutting comprised a foolhardy attempt to connect, for good and ill: “The couples have made sex by turns their toy, their glue, their trauma, their therapy, their hope, their frustration, their revenge, their narcotic, their main line of communication and their sole and pitiable shield against the awareness of death.”
Every writer needs an alter-ego, and Henry Bech was Updike’s. The differences are important. Bech was Jewish, Updike Protestant. Bech was saddled with writer’s block, Updike probably didn’t know what that felt like. But in the short stories assembled in this, the first of three Bech story collections (Bech is Back, 1982 and Bech at Bay, 1998 both followed), Updike is at his most playfully post-modern. An introduction from Bech to Updike is presented as fact, a charade that the author would continue through the decade, such as in a 1971 interview published in The New York Times. The series was also not without humor, as seen by the super-Protestant author’s comment in a 1982 interview with TIME that he, “created Henry Bech to show that I was really a Jewish writer also.” It’s actually Updike as his most comedic, a vein he probably tapped into less than he should have.
The Grammys honored Houston in the awards themselves, which showcased forceful women who had dominated the year in music, and reminded us of her TV influence as American Idol’s diva ideal.
From Nicki Minaj’s Red Riding Hood getup to Katy Perry’s head-to-toe blue ensemble, TIME rounds up some of the best (and worst!) sartorial choices at the annual music awards show.
