When we first encounter Max he is a man in crisis divorced and largely estranged from his three grown-up children

When we first encounter Max he is a man in crisis, divorced and largely estranged from his three grown-up children. He feels under siege: a newspaper has accused him of evangelism and implied that his family has been driven away by his zeal.
What disturbs him most is that someone very close to him must have spoken to the journalist This prompts a long soul-searching. Heavyweight champion Muhammad Ali announced, ‘I don’t have no personal quarrel with those Viet Congs.’”For most of the time, Updike’s verbal gaze is as sharp as ever: “If light was behind her, Owen would see her pubic triangle dripping from a point like a wet goatee between her skinny thighs.” The whole purpose of the book is, in this sense, a kind of dual telescoping: to give a more accurate rendering of the scrawled M that mesmerised Owen in his early life, and to bring the blurring memories of his sexual past precisely into focus.To claim that this is misogynistic is to miss the point. There are a few moments, here, when this coupling is done in the style of documentaries trying to give a bit of lazy context to hit singles: “It was 1967… Lunar Orbiter V was launched to obtain a complete mapping of the moon’s surface, including the dark side.

This has always been one of Updike’s skills: freighting his characters intimate lives with what is going on in society at large. It is a vexed question because, in this modern Faustian pact, the soul claimed by the devil might turn out to be not Owen’s, but his wife’s. The slide into infidelity is, in these terms, like a secular version of the loss of religious faith lamented by Matthew Arnold in the poem from which the book draws its epigraph.As in Couples the reasons – Updike avoids blame – for the husband’s straying lie partly with the wife’s relative sexual reserve It is also a question of history. She introduces them to marijuana and, while no one is looking, offers to blow Owen Stoned, he rejects her advances.

Rueing this missed opportunity and conscious of the way it repeats an earlier youthful failure of nerve, he resolves not to make the same mistake again.Like Piet in Couples, he soon discovers that all you need to achieve what had once seemed so difficult – get laid – is to want to After a point, you don’t even have to do it. Act like you want to; you acquire an air.The question, hovering constantly on the fringes of the narrative, is the extent to which this air is tainted. As in Couples, the marriage limps on after the wife – weary from raising children, plans for a doctorate long abandoned – learns about what has been going on.Moving beyond the time-frame of the earlier novel, Owen and Phyllis get their first “whiffs of the counterculture” courtesy of the young wife of Owen’s business partner. Taken as a whole, Updike’s work adds up to a huge, constantly changing compendium of what it feels – and smells and tastes – like to be alive (or man alive, at any rate). He has the advantage over his nearest, and unlikeliest rival, D H Lawrence, for the simple reason that Lawrence did not have the chance to experience what it was like to grow old.As a young man, the protagonist of Villages is told by his first wife, “You’re very tied to your senses, Owen.” As an old man of 70 – the same age as Updike writing the book – Owen’s senses are decaying. Needless to say, Updike conveys this dulling with pinprick precision, particularly the way that memory (itself growing spotty, “as if,” he has written elsewhere, “the film was sprinkled with developer instead of being immersed in it”) struggles to fix what was transitory, fleeting.As the book opens, Owen is lying in bed, his “hand gripping his drowsy prick”, remembering some of the women he slept with in the Sixties and Seventies.

Owen was a computer whiz then, a proto-nerd, but he could be an ageing Piet Hanema looking back in Updike’s Couples (1968). The overlap of period and setting is pretty explicit.When Couples begins, Piet is already in the midst of his comfortable life of serial adultery. In Villages, we go back to Owen’s boyhood when he sees, crudely chiselled on a shed, “what looked like a swollen letter M, but, on examination, was a naked woman, legs bent at the knee”. A little later, walking with his parents, Owen spots “a milky-white thing like a collapsed balloon” lying in the grit. His mum yells at him not to touch the condom but these twinned discoveries exert a hold on him that is never relinquished.From adolescent gropings in a car, Owen progresses to MIT, where he meets, falls in love with, marries and – at last, on their wedding night – beds Phyllis They have kids, move to a small town A few years later Owen is tempted into his first affair. She explains how, despite her serious injuries, she came to be cast as spokeswoman for the victims.. Brendan Kennelly is more famous than Seamus Heaney That’s in Ireland, of course In England, he can wander the streets without being noticed.

In Dublin, he can’t walk down a road without being stopped by a stranger It’s not autographs that people want from him, but poems. For Brendan Kennelly – poet, pundit, TV personality and professor – has also taken on the unofficial role of Ireland’s poetry confessor

Brendan Kennelly is more famous than Seamus Heaney That’s in Ireland, of course In England, he can wander the streets without being noticed. “I was here at 8 o’clock this morning” he tells me cheerfully when I arrive at the scheduled time of 10.30 “I have the sluggard’s respect for precision. I have a real terror” he continues “because I’m a slowcoach and I love strolling – and in my mind I’m always late for everything.