Much of the plot of Couples (which opens on the evening of March 24, 1962, and integrates historical events like the loss of the USS Thresher on April 10, 1963, the Profumo affair, and the Kennedy assassination in November 1963) concerns the efforts of its characters to balance the pressures of Protestant sexual mores against increasingly flexible American attitudes toward sex in the 1960s.

[citation needed] The book suggests that this relaxation may have been driven by the development of birth control and the opportunity to enjoy what one character refers to as "the post-pill paradise".

The novel was widely and enthusiastically reviewed,[citation needed] landing Updike on the cover of Time magazine, a rare location for an author.

[3] Critic and novelist Wilfred Sheed, in the New York Times Book Review, found Couples "ingenious" and "scorching...the games are described with loving horror."

Addressing the novel's famous frankness about sexual manners, Sheed wrote, "If this is a dirty book, I don't see how sex can be written about at all.

Updike's treatment of sex is central to his method, which is that of a fictional biochemist approaching mankind with a tray of hypersensitive gadgets.

[6] Couples is often cited as a historically important depiction of the sexual revolution of the 1960s, along with Philip Roth's Portnoy's Complaint (1969) and Gore Vidal's Myra Breckinridge (1968).

[9] To an interviewer's question about the difficulty of writing scenes about sex, Updike replied: "They were no harder than landscapes and a little more interesting.

"[10] And in the Paris Review "Art of Fiction" interview series, he discussed the disappearance of his novel's hero into the story's happy ending:[11] There's also a way, though, I should say, in which, with the destruction of the church, with the removal of Piet's guilt, he becomes insignificant.