SOURCE: “‘The Adulterous Society’: John Updike's Marry Me,” in Modern Fiction Studies, Vol. 37, No. 1, Spring, 1991, pp. 61–79.

In the following essay, Leckie examines the social, literary, and philosophical significance of marriage and infidelity as presented in Marry Me.

[F]iction is also a mode of spying; we read it as we look in windows or listen to gossip, to learn what other people do.

—John Updike, Picked-Up Pieces

The quintessentially private life that entered the novel … was, by its very nature and as opposed to public life, closed. In essence one could only spy and eavesdrop on it. The literature of private life is essentially a literature of snooping about, of overhearing “how others live.”

—Mikhail Bakhtin, The Dialogic Imagination

The 26 April 1968 Cover of Time Magazine features a picture of John Updike. The illustration, in the manner of American realist painting, depicts Updike looking candidly out at the viewer...