Villages by John Updike (best book club books for discussion TXT) 📕

into his psyche. “Don’t think like your father and stick to the safe thing,” she pleaded. “He thought a safe thing was the knitting mills, and look what happened to them. There is no safe thing. America’s the bastion of capitalism, that’s what all this is about, isn’t it? If computers are half the wonders you think they are, they’re going to make fortunes, and you’re in on the ground floor.”

He knew she was, as usual, right, but was offended, slightly, to realize that she was not above considering her material position. She wanted him to earn money, if not for herself, then for her children. She wanted to get out of military housing and into an apartment, a place all their own. Childbearing had thickened Phyllis; her face, no less delicate a silverpoint than before, sat atop a broader pillar, her nightgown falling from her milk-stuffed breasts in straight Doric folds.

She was right: what he had learned with SAGE led nicely, in his job at the IBM complex on Madison Avenue in New York City, into work on what came to be called SABRE, the nationwide computerized reservation system being developed with American Airlines. The largest civilian computerization task ever undertaken, it involved a million lines of program code, two hundred technicians, ten thousand miles of leased telecommunication lines, and a thousand agents using desktop terminals connected to two IBM 7090 mainframes north of the city, in Briarcliff Manor. One computer was live and the other was duplexed, waiting in case of breakdown. A tiny fraction of those million lines of code were Owen’s creation; because of him the AND and OR gates and the IF … THEN forks shuttled flight numbers, abbreviated terminal names, prices, and individual seats into the right electronic slots half a continent away. His inborn Scots thrift became a passion for electronic economy—for reformulations that would bypass an elaborate subroutine or redundant loop and save a sliver of time he could clearly sense as the monitor screen, like a wearying boxer, responded to the tapped keys.

Phyllis, for the free hour of evening when the two babies were at last asleep and the dinner dishes sang in the dishwasher, could follow his explanations, though this was not her kind of math, these electrons flying around and around the algorithmic circuit like horses plodding around a millstone, and she could sometimes suggest, in a weightless leap of insight, a fresh way around some linear difficulty; Owen would be quite dazzled, and fall in love with her anew.

When he had spotted her floating through the crowds at MIT he had not foreseen the growing weight she would bring with her—the soggy diapers, the luggage of cribs and carriages, bibs and jars of Gerber’s puree, the clamor of unsleeping need, the cycles of fretful illness as germs ricocheted within the family, the multiplied responsibilities cantilevered far into the future into college and beyond. Bourgeois comfort took on girth in Eisenhower’s second term: big-finned cars, tall pastel refrigerators, roaring, dripping air-conditioners greedy for electricity. Phyllis’s spirited intelligence had nowhere to go within the sluggish, clogged dailiness of life in their succession of two-bedroom apartments. They moved from noisy East 55th Street between Lex and Third to 63rd, farther east; still they did not escape the metropolitan racket that kept her awake and left her to sleepwalk through her days with the two toddlers. In the intricate realm beneath the mid-town streets, into which helmeted men descended and from which puffs of steam escaped, there was endless revision; all-night jackhammers went on fixing the same thing week after week.

Somehow she was pregnant again. Owen couldn’t imagine how it had happened, he was keeping such brutally long hours at the airline project. SABRE was named in 1960, after a kind of Buick, but posing as an acronym: Semi-Automatic Business Research Environment. Before the system was operational, other airlines—Delta, Pan American—signed up with IBM, and the country’s banks and accounting offices were waking up to the computerized future. There arose a hungry market in even smaller companies for programs speeding their payrolls, inventories, invoices. In 1960 there were perhaps five thousand computers in the country, most of them in universities and scientific labs, and the programmers worked with paper-tape readers and punches and stayed up all night for computer time. The word “software” had arrived, and “bugs” and “debugging.” FORTRAN had been developed at IBM, for mostly scientific work; COBOL 60—Common Business Oriented Language 1960—opened the computer to business applications. The world of affordable PCs was two decades away, but a fellow IBM minion in the Madison Avenue hive, Ed Mervine, began to woo Owen, over lunches in the company cafeteria, with its eggshell walls each decorated by a deadpan sign bearing President Watson’s famous imperative. Ed, from the Bronx, had an offhand, stabbing way of speaking that was more efficient than it seemed. He confided above their trays, “You know, O., there’s a world out there of medium-sized companies that have paid a couple hundred thousand for hardware they don’t know how to operate. As the price comes down, there’s bound to be more of them. Manufacturers, distributors, these new franchises, lesser airlines, banks, architectural firms. IBM and Sperry Rand can’t be bothered with them; they farm them out, to assholes.”

Ed was the first adult to take enough interest in Owen to give him a nickname, “O.” He reminded Owen of Buddy Rourke—same stiff hair shooting forward so his brow looked low, same big teeth, corrected in Ed’s case by boyhood braces that left him with teeth that looked a little false, not quite what his face had in mind. He was the same inch or two taller than Owen, though unlike Buddy he was younger, just enough younger to be more at home with the idea of machines that help people think, thousands of tiny thoughts, or bit transactions, a second. To Owen it was a marvel; to Ed it was a fact of life.

“So what are you suggesting? We become better