Synopses & Reviews
In this brilliant novel, John Updike has created one of his most memorable characters: the Reverend Tom Marshfield -- literate, charming, sexual -- whose outrageous behavior with the ladies of his flock scandalizes his parish....
Review
"John Updike's 'A Month of Sundays' concerns the involuntary retreat of the Reverend Tom Marshfield to a desert place to recuperate from his 'distraction,' although he prefers to diagnose his malady as 'the human condition.' It will be no surprise to find Updike's characteristically dense imagery conveying the essential ambiguity of that condition nor to find the relationship between man and woman an inexhaustible emblem. The names of his characters, drawn from 'The Scarlet Letter,' show them to be the true children of their puritan ancestors, adept literalizers bent upon destroying paradise anew. Like Hawthorne, Updike in earlier novels has used nature as the source of his most ambiguous images; but in this novel the images from the natural world are sparser, less luxuriant, while the images associated with the human body are more extravagant, and language itself provides a ground of wildness unsurpassed by Hawthorne's darkest forest." Reviewed by Daniel Weiss, Virginia Quarterly Review (Copyright 2006 Virginia Quarterly Review)
Synopsis
An antic riff on Hawthorne's Scarlet Letter, in which a latter-day Arthur Dimmesdale is sent west from his Midwestern parish in sexual disgrace--from one of the most gifted American writers of the twentieth century and the author of the acclaimed Rabbit series.
"Updike may be America's finest novelist and this] is quintessential Updike."--The Washington Post
At a desert retreat dedicated to rest, recreation, and spiritual renewal, this fortyish serial fornicator is required to keep a journal whose thirty-one weekly entries constitute the book you now hold in your hand. In his wonderfully overwrought style he lays bare his soul and his past--his marriage to the daughter of his ethics professor, his affair with his organist, his antipathetic conversations with his senile father and his bisexual curate, his golf scores, his poker hands, his Biblical exegeses, and his smoldering desire for the directress of the retreat, the impregnable Ms. Prynne. A testament for our times.
About the Author
John Updike was born in Shillington, Pennsylvania, in 1932. He graduated from Harvard College in 1954 and spent a year in Oxford, England, at the Ruskin School of Drawing and Fine Art. From 1955 to 1957 he was a member of the staff of The New Yorker. His novels have won the Pulitzer Prize, the National Book Award, the National Book Critics Circle Award, the Rosenthal Foundation Award, and the William Dean Howells Medal. In 2007 he received the Gold Medal for Fiction from the American Academy of Arts and Letters. John Updike died in January 2009.