Jenny Jackson, author of Pineapple Street, is back with The Shampoo Effect, out today from Pamela Dorman/Viking Books. Below, she discusses how John Updike’s Couples inspired her new novel. (Photo credit: Torey Liddel)
I grew up in Ipswich, Massachusetts, a seaside town north of Boston famous for three things: beer, clams, and John Updike.
The celebrated author wrote his biggest books, including the Rabbit novels, while living on East Street, a few blocks from my house. Ipswich is a small town, and Updike was very much a celebrity in the midst, winning every major literary prize, appearing on the cover of Life magazine, and regularly contributing to the New Yorker.
But he wasn’t a reclusive star; instead, he was enmeshed in the social fabric of the town, playing volleyball with a big gang of friends, parenting his small children alongside a dozen other couples, and conducting messy extramarital affairs with a few of them.
In 1968, he published the novel Couples, a story of adultery, unplanned pregnancy, and partner-swapping in a small Massachusetts town, and it didn’t take much detective work for readers to figure out who he was writing about.
The book put a spotlight on Ipswich, painting a portrait of the place as a hotbed of sexual adventure, and causing a moral outcry. At the same time, the book was a cultural phenomenon, a #1 New York Times bestseller, the biggest of Updike’s career.
I’ve been an editor at Knopf, Updike’s publisher, for the past twenty-five years, and so I’ve thought a lot about Couples, about the impact it had on American readers and on our small town. What would it be like if he published Couples today? Would it be as scandalous?
In 1968, the sexual revolution was playing out across America. The birth control pill was brand new. Most people waited until marriage to have sex, most people married by the age of 22 or 23. In many ways, things that felt shocking at the time wouldn’t raise an eyebrow today.
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On the other hand, I can only imagine how social media would amplify the guessing game of who’s who in a novel like this. I can picture blurry iPhone pictures of Updike’s friends getting out of cars or kissing on the porch. Podcasts detailing the timelines of their affairs. Entire Reddit threads devoted to the scandal.
With my new novel, The Shampoo Effect, I have played out the idea of a writer arriving in a small town today, becoming entangled in the social set.
It is a story of betrayals, pregnancy, secrets, and gossip among a group of friends in a thinly veiled Ipswich. A New Yorker arrives in Massachusetts, she falls in with a wild group of friends, she joins their messy affairs, and then she discovers just what it means to write about real people.
The novel is full of beer and clams, too, a true homage to everything that made Ipswich famous, everything I love about home.
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