In search of adultery in 'anywhere'

For a long time I used to go to bed early.''For a long time, his wife has awoken early...' - the opening sentences of two novels. The first is Marcel Proust's A La Recherche Du Temps Perdu, the second, veteran American writer John Updike's new book Villages, where the nod to Proust sets out its agenda: memory.

We're back in the territory of small-town adultery that Updike first laid bare so controversially nearly four decades ago in his novel Couples, this time filtered through the memory of retired software designer Owen Mackenzie.

Owen's life is neatly compartmentalised into the three villages (small towns to us) it has been lived in.

First is Willow, rural Pennsylvania, where he grows from a fearful child terrified by wet clothes emerging 'like giant wrinkled tongues' from the wringer on his mother's washing machine into a fearful teenager spooked enough by woodland night noises outside his parked car to turn down his first invitation to sex.

It's not a problem that afflicts him in his second village, middle class Middle Falls, the suburbia where he passes his life's central phase, married-with-children to university sweetheart Phyllis. Here he almost wilts under the barrage of sexual advances from desperate housewives both liberated and bored by Sixties consumerism, and becomes a serial adulterer.

In the 40 years since Couples, Updike has lost none of his lucid poetry when writing about sex, his ability to transmute the vulgar into something altogether beautiful.

But now the infidelity so shocking in the earlier book, seen from today's anytime-anyone-anywhere perspective, seems quaintly gentlemanly. People discuss their prospective adultery first; they make dates to commit it.

What makes Owen so attractive to women? That sense of 'otherness', of being separate from everyone else, that afflicts authors, too. And for him adultery is a chance to connect. He never quite manages it, remaining awestruck by the sheer difference of the opposite sex.'Why,' he constantly asks them, 'do women have sex?'

Relishing that same mystery in mathematics makes Owen a software genius and wealthy, and it's no coincidence that his favourite romantic trysting place is his creative den at work. Inevitably philandering sucks his creativity dry and he is left behind by computer technology. He sells out and retires with second wife Julia to his third - and final - village, Haskells Crossing, to recollect his past in the tranquillity of golfing, dabbling in oil painting, bickering, staying faithful and awaiting death, while the brash present elbows aside the elegant past.

Shopping malls proliferate: 'There are fewer and fewer somewheres in America, and more and more anywheres.' The mathematical beauty of computer language has been subverted for pornography, bargain-hunting and idle chat. What, in the end, endures? asks Updike. Memory, and after that, oblivion. Wonderful stuff.

Villages by John Upddike (Hamish Hamilton, £17.99)