jenny jacksonauthor of pineapple street, is back with shampoo effectPublished today from Pamela Dorman/Viking Books. Below, she discusses how John Updike couple Inspired his new novel. (Photo credit: Tori Liddell)
I grew up in Ipswich, Massachusetts, a seaside town north of Boston famous for three things: beer, clams, and John Updike.
The famous author wrote his greatest books, including Rabbit Novel, while living on East Street, a few blocks from my house. Ipswich is a small town, and Updike was very famous at the time, winning every major literary award and appearing on its cover. life magazine, and is regularly contributing to New Yorker.
But he was not a solitary star; Instead, he was enmeshed in the social fabric of the town, playing volleyball with a large group of friends, raising his young children with a dozen other couples, and having chaotic extramarital affairs with some of them.
In 1968 he published the novel couple, A tale of adultery, unplanned pregnancy, and partner-swapping in a small town in Massachusetts, and readers didn’t need to do much sleuthing to figure out what he was writing about.
The book highlighted Ipswich, portrayed the place as a center of sexual thrills, and caused a moral outrage. Also, this book was a cultural phenomenon, #1 new York Times Bestseller, the biggest of Updike’s career.
I have been an editor at Knopf, Updike’s publisher, for the past twenty-five years, and so I have thought a lot about couple, About its impact on American readers and our small town. What would it be like if it gets published? couple Today? Would it be equally condemnable?
In 1968, a sexual revolution was underway across America. The contraceptive pill was brand new. Most people waited until marriage to have sex, with most people marrying at age 22 or 23. In many ways, things that seemed shocking at the time would not upset anyone today.
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On the other hand, I can only imagine how social media would enhance the game of guessing who it is in such a novel. I can see blurry iPhone photos of Updike’s friends getting out of their cars or kissing on the porch. The podcast details the timeline of their cases. Entire Reddit threads are dedicated to this scam.
With my new novel, shampoo effect, I have presented the idea of a writer coming to a small town today and getting entangled in social constraints.
It is a story of betrayal, pregnancy, secrets and gossip among a group of friends in a thinly veiled Ipswich. A New Yorker comes to Massachusetts, she meets up with a wild group of friends, she gets involved in their messy affairs, and then she discovers what it means to write about real people.
The novel is full of beer and clams, too, and it’s a true homage to everything that made Ipswich famous, everything I love about home.
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