A Month of Sundays

by John Updike

In the brilliant new novel, John Updike has created one of his most memorable characters: the Reverence Tom Marshfield -- literate, charming, sexual -- whose outrageous behavior with the ladies of his flock scandalizes his parish....

Genres: Fiction, Literature, Literary Fiction, Novels, Classics, American, Religion

272 pages, Mass Market Paperback

First published January 1, 1974

About the author

John Hoyer Updike was an American writer. Updike's most famous work is his Rabbit series (Rabbit, Run; Rabbit Redux; Rabbit Is Rich; Rabbit At Rest; and Rabbit Remembered). Rabbit is Rich and Rabbit at Rest both won Pulitzer Prizes for Updike. Describing his subject as "the American small town, Protestant middle class," Updike is well known for his careful craftsmanship and prolific writing, having published 22 novels and more than a dozen short story collections as well as poetry, literary criticism and children's books. Hundreds of his stories, reviews, and poems have appeared in The New Yorker since the 1950s. His works often explore sex, faith, and death, and their inter-relationships.

He died of lung cancer at age 76.

Reviews

[Vit Babenco · Rating 5 out of 5]

In this deliberately and sarcastically controversial novel John Updike simply excels at dissecting biblical contradictions and pointing his finger at religious incongruities.

Alicia in bed was a revelation. At last I confronted as in an ecstatic mirror my own sexual demon. In such a hurry we did not always take time to remove socks and necklaces and underthings that clung to us then like shards or epaulettes, we would tumble upon her low square bed…

Where do the priests guilty of sin of adultery and fornication go? No, they don’t go to hell, they go to a remote retreat for recreation, contemplation of their sinful past and to take a rest from their tedious sins… And there they are obliged to write detailed diaries for posterity and all to whom it may concern…
And A Month of Sundays is one of those secret diaries. And the best things in this diary are sinful sermons.

“Of the two adulterous women Christ encounters in the Gospels, as we have seen, one is commended, and the other is not condemned. Indeed this latter woman was brought to Him, we may conjecture, by the Pharisees to trap Him into asking enforcement of a death penalty universally acknowledged to be absurd. For, as He repeatedly asserts, this is an ‘adulterous generation.’ So Jeremiah had found his generation, and Hosea his; for Israel ever breaks its covenant with the Lord, and yet the Lord ever loves, and ever forgives.
Adultery, my friends, is our inherent condition: ‘Ye have heard that it was said by them of old time, Thou shalt not commit adultery: But I say unto you, That whosoever looketh on a woman to lust after her hath committed adultery with her already in his heart.’
But who that has eyes to see cannot so lust? Was not the First Divine Commandment received by human ears, ‘Be fruitful, and multiply’? Adultery is not a choice to be avoided; it is a circumstance to be embraced. Thus I construe these texts.”

Sins… Original sin… Deadly sins… Sins are as ancient as humanity and would there be humankind without the original sin?

[Valeriu Gherghel · Rating 3 out of 5]

Romanul lui Updike nu se citește nici repede, nici ușor.

Despre pastorul trimis într-o pensiune de reeducare (administrată de doamna Prynne) știți deja din prezentarea cărții. A păcătuit, a dat iama prin oițele parohiei (s-a încurcat cu organista, dar și cu pioasa soție a unui bancher), a profitat de inocența și naivitatea mioarelor, își merită cu vîrf și îndesat recluziunea de 4 săptămîni. Scrie zilnic într-un jurnal tot ce-i trece prin cap. Își povestește viața, polemizează cu teologi reformați, ca faimoșii Karl Barth și Paul Johannes Tillich, uneori se ceartă și cu Luther.

Crede că nu crede, nu crede că crede, nu crede că nu crede. Crede și nu crede. Nu e un ateu propriu-zis (ateul are numai certitudini, iar pastorul Tom nu are nici una) și, dacă-mi permiteți, nu e nici eretic, fiindcă el nu caută să-și justifice căderile prin versete din Scripturi, nu invocă autorități și, la urma urmelor, nu a păcătuit din pricini dogmatice. E un om obișnuit. Spune:

„Mi-am pierdut credința. Sau mai degrabă o am, dar pare să nu fie cea potrivită” (p.165). Și încă:

„Diagnosticul meu e că nu sufăr de nimic mai virulent decît de condiția umană” (p.5).

Așadar, jurnalul lui nu este un răspuns umil pentru superiori (episcop & diaconi), o suplică, o recunoaștere a vinovăției. În fond, n-a fost acuzat de nimic, cazul lui a fost mușamalizat, va fi trimis la o biserică de periferie. Pastorul Tom nu are de gînd să-și toarne cenușa căinței în cap. Nici nu i s-a cerut asta. Notele lui au un singur destinatar: doamna Prynne, „gentila și mult prea răbdătoarea lui cititoare” (p.171). Nu știe dacă acest Cititor Ideal va catadicsi să-i citească spovedania. Dar speră...

Pastorul Tom Marshfield nu scrie rău, deși a fost puternic influențat de stilul prozatorului american John Updike. Textul lui este o modalitate respectuoasă de seducție. Va reuși? Va trezi în sufletul gentilei doamne Prynne un sentiment de bunăvoință? Dieu seul le sait ...

[Robin · Rating 2 out of 5]

I've been a devotée of John Updike's for a while now. Reading his Rabbit, Run was a "come to Jesus" experience for me. So profound was his impact, I became an Updike-ian fundamentalist, eager to spread his Good News.

So you'll understand when I tell you I was seated in the first pew, with much love for this author, and an open heart with which to receive his message.

Imagine my dismay though, reading this 1974 novel in which Reverend Tom Marshall is sent away to naughty-priest-camp for making the rounds in his parish with his er, holy sceptre, and finding that I... didn't like it. Whaaaaa???

It was so promising! It features a philandering man of the cloth. It examines the phallic game of golf (which is, I can confirm, as interesting to read about as it is to watch on television). It's written by one of last century's brilliant scribes. How could it go wrong? Well, I'll tell you.

As I mentioned earlier, Tom is sent away for being a bad, bad Reverend. Having sex with the ladies in his congregation isn't quite what the church deacons deem acceptable behaviour. So he's off on a month long sabbatical of sorts, in which he receives no real punishment or therapy. He plays golf, poker, and uses a typewriter to write his version of how he got into this predicament.

Doesn't sound too bad to you? Well, Reverend Tom is a truly despicable ass, and we never get a break from him, not for one page. When he's at his best, he's describing his two-timing shenanigans. At his worst, he's delivering one sermon after the next, twisting Biblical passages to suit his belief that humanity's natural state is that of adultery. He does this using the most pretentious, decadent language possible, practically forcing my eyes to glaze over, to skim paragraphs. Making it impossible for me NOT to huff and shake my head.

I huff not because I take exception to his behaviour, or because I feel offended by his warped "religion". No, it's just because it's all so damn self indulgent. Self indulgent and... boring. We all know Updike was preoccupied with the extra-marital state. We know he couldn't reconcile his stubborn WASP-ish identity with a sexuality that could not be tamed, and this conflict rears its ugly head over and over in his books. It worked really well for me in Marry Me and the Rabbit tetralogy, only tepidly so in Couples.

But here? Reading this was like being witness to John Updike orating in the pulpit, shoving his rhetoric down our throats, expecting us to shout "AMEN" and then afterwards tear off his robes and kneel before him in the vestry.

Not me, not this time. Sorry, Mr. Updike. I haven’t lost faith, but as it turns out, I really don’t like being preached at.

[Jeffrey Keeten · Rating 5 out of 5]

“Suspect each moment, for it is a thief, tiptoeing away with more than it brings.”

There is SEX in this book. There is ADULTERY in this book. There is PEEPING in this book. OMG there is also GOLF in this book which with its phallic clubs, balls, and holes is also (baffling) about SEX.

We meet Reverend Thomas Marshfield in the pages of his confessional writings from his incarceration in a country club for fallen priests and ministers where he is being punish by playing GOLF and POKE-HER with his fellow detainees. Poor guy, it is almost on par with Guantanamo Bay.



Reverend (Doubting) Thomas' troubles all begin with a crises of faith wrapped around one whopper of a mid-life crises. He falls leaps into bed with the organist at his church. The freshly divorced and emotional available, lush of hip and breast, Alicia. She proves to be the beginning and end of his attempt to break free of the shackles of his life and marriage.

Though his marriage to Jane has turned into a dusty caricature of the vibrant relationship it used to be Thomas is unwilling to be the one to destroy the ties of marriage, even though he is quite willing to tromp all over the vows of marriage. His inability to break away from Jane pushes the lush Alicia into the arms of Ned Dork Bork, assistant minister. This leads to peeping (Tom) as Thomas tries to spy on the couple fueling his own jealousy and ultimately leading to the firing of Alicia from her job at the church. The wrath of a scorned woman will be visited upon the balding pate of our poor Thomas.

Frankie Harlow, staunch believer, but unhappy wife, is the next conquest for the reverend. He counsels her on her marriage, but the whole time is plotting her seduction. As it happens she is not that difficult of a quarry, and soon Thomas finds himself gazing upon the beautiful body of his desire and unable to rise to the occasion. Her belief, her faith, are stumbling blocks that will not allow him to consummate their unholy union. In desperation he tries to get her to renounce her faith hoping that will put the lead back in the pencil, but though she is willing to roger Thomas until the second coming, she cannot renounce her faith.

Thomas' affairs with Alicia and Frankie do not go unnoticed. He is overwhelmed with requests for appointments for counseling with his female flock. He becomes the Casanova of the collar. As he relays to us: "There is a grandeur of dizzying altitude in the act of placing a communion wafer between the parted lips of a mouth that, earlier in the very week of which this was the Sabbath day, had received one's throbbingly ejaculated seed."


Body of Christ?

All goes well until the now unemployed Alicia decides to go to one of the city elders, the banker Harlow, also the husband of the faith hampered Frankie, and reveals all. The shit storm that follows lands Thomas in the country club, writing his memoirs as part of his therapy and sneaking love notes within the text of those same memoirs to his jailer the previously pious Ms. Prynne.



I mentioned at the beginning of this review that GOLF has sexual overtones at least for our libidinous Thomas. He is golfing with his priestly and equally deviant companions. "Jamie Ray swings miserably but putts like an angel; I sometimes wonder if buggery hasn't made the hole look relatively huge to him. Whereas us poor c**t men keep sliding off the side, hunched over fearful as fetuses who suddenly realize they can never push their craniums through a three-and-a-half inch pelvic opening."


What a lecher you are Mr. Updike.

The New England writers John Updike and John Cheever are always a source of pleasure to me. They are talented, well educated writers, often obsessed with the most basic urges of the human condition and yet somehow putting a veneer of class on those same baser instincts that plague,uplift, and consume us all.

If you wish to see more of my most recent book and movie reviews, visit http://www.jeffreykeeten.com
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[Lawyer · Rating 4 out of 5]

A Month of Sundays, John Updike's Unreliable Gospel According to Thomas Marshfield

Meet Thomas Marshfield, a Christian Minister tending to a flock somewhere back East, above and beyond the pale of Ministry, especially where his female congregants are concerned. Here is a contemporary Doubting Thomas, on a Sabbatical of sorts. He is, short of being de-frocked, sent to a desolate motel, located in the desert, a program for ministers who have, shall we say problems regarding human frailty.

Thomas contemplates his indiscretions for a month of Sundays, along with his fellow inhabitants of a suitably Omegan shaped motel. Somewhat a Hotel California, it comes with a bar, a restaurant, golf and poker. But the literature available is of limited nature--the library is limited to harmless mysteries, English cozies, and the locked room puzzles of John Dickson Carr.

Ironically, the unnamed Administratrix is named, Ms. Prynne. Prynne? We don't know her first name, but in typical sly Updkie humor, one wonders if her first name is Hester.

Updike reveals Thomas' Alpha to Omega through a stream of journal entries, written to "the Reader." It is a mea culpa toting up his sins of commission and omission.

Thomas is the son of a minister. His father was a student of Tillichian theology. Thomas wishing to be more formidable in his religiosity opts for the less forgiving position of Karl Barth. The doctrine of Election wryly applies to Thomas in ways Karl Barth never intended. Thomas is not among the Elect in the sense of being among the saved. Thomas has selected to be among the damned.

Perhaps there is something of the Oedipal complex at play here. Thomas's quest takes on the search for his long dead mother. His aging father is lost in dementia, a resident of a nursing home. Although he most often doesn't recognize Thomas as his son, there are moments where he obviously does. The implication is that Thomas's mother was not the saint she believed he was. Neither was his father, who mistakes Thomas for his twin brother Erasmus or a former comrade in arms during WWI. Prior to entering the ministry, Daddy Marshfield recounts with ribald glee his escapades in France, waxing profane on his preference for a small woman with a small ass and breasts. Now that's the filly who provides the greatest joie de vivre! Right, Mooney? Raucous laughter of memories stored away long ago, echo through the nursing home.

The Alpha of Thomas is not extraordinary. He attends seminary. Marries a professor's daughter. In typical fashion, through the years, they have come to resemble one another physically. The bloom is off the rose. Thomas has two sons, Stephen and Martin, completely unalike. He cannot relate to him. The brothers, in Cain and Abel fashion, do not get along. Martin looks for the finer things in life, attending an exclusive private school that taxes the Marshfield coffers to the limit. Martin is studious, perhaps a bit of a dilettante, unmindful of the cost to his family. Stephen out of apparent love for the Father, or his father, elects to go to public school out of sacrifice to the family. He excels in sports, while Martin is the sensitive scholar of the two.

Back in the desert, it is journal writing between breakfast at noon. The journal is a self examination of the penitent's past and an acknowledgement of the indiscretions that brought each of them to their placement there. Along with Thomas there are fallen priests, ministers, preachers each with their own predilection leading to their cause of fall from grace, if grace exists at all. The Bible is not in existence at Thomas's Omega shaped retreat. Nor is it meant to be.

After journaling it's a daily round of Golf. The bar is always open. Poker at night. Although the penitents are not to discuss their peccadilloes that landed them in their spiritual wilderness, gradually they each learn of the others' most untheological downfalls. Unlike Christ's temptations avoided during his forty days in the wilderness, Thomas regales the reader with his most human and therefore faulty behavior, though he rationalizes the Dickens out of it.

It began with Alicia. One can almost hear Updike chuckling when he named Thomas's church organist. The very way in which Thomas describes her has the ring of Humbert Humbert's "Lo-Li-ta." Each time Thomas writes the name, it is with an air of "Ahhhh, A-liiic-i-aaaa!"

Alicia is a woman of many talents, adroitly handling two children as the divorced single mother. She fills the church with the soaring sounds of Bach to Buxtahude. The liturgy is shortened as Alicia turns Thomas' sermons into brief platitudes as she lengthen the muscial elements of worship bringing in brass instruments, percussionists, and, Good God, guitarists!

Worst of all, Alicia has determined that Thomas is her salvation from being single, adroitly persuading Thomas to leave Janet and his sons for a life with her. She has the sexual abilities of a lusty Lillith with a preference for the superior position, enthusiastically riding Thomas as easily as managing a stallion. And stallion, Thomas discovers, he is.

In a humorous series of episodes, Thomas attempts to foist his Assistant Pastor, Ned Bork on Janet, cajoling his wife, "Haven't you ever wondered what it would be like to be with another man? He constantly invites Ned for dinner, finding some reason to leave to perform some ministerial duty in the hopes that Ned and Janet will find themselves in delightful in flagrante delicto, but neither party is buying it.

Alicia, a practical woman, turns her affections to Ned Bork, who readily accepts them, to the chagrin of Thomas who begins to see her car parked at Ned's garage apartment next to the parsonage. He is obsessed by the knowledge that his ultra-liberal Assistant is having his anatomical flute played by his former mistress.

Poor Thomas enters into a string of liaisons with his female congregants. The teenaged bride who married too quickly, too early, and realized she had made a life changing mistake. The emaciated divorcee, whose most prominent feature is an outstanding pudenda, always jutting out from her emaciated frame. Then, the fatal alliance with the head Deacon's sainted wife, Frankie Harlow. Ah, Harlow, ash blonde, gracefully aging, who detests the sight of her husband.

Harlow is Thomas's ideal of love. Faithful to the core. Image of Mother Mary. Perhaps, image of Thomas's own lost mother. Svelte, curved appropriately, with a luminescent body bathed in a lambent glow of chiaroscuro whatever the lighting. There's one problem. Thomas cannot service poor Frankie, no matter her skills with lips, tongue or hands. Damn.

Frankie is Thomas' Jocasta. And he is blinded by his inability to consummate his most desired seduction.

Urged on by Frankie that that woman who plays the organ has turned Sunday morning worship into a concert rather than devotion to the Word, Thomas decides to fire Alicia, no longer his, Ah, A-liii-c-i-a! Alicia, scorned as a lover, deprived of her job, tells all to the Deacons.

And thereupon hangs the tale of Thomas's Month of Sundays in the wilderness without any outlet for all the temptations of the memory of his many conquests, of all the congregants who have knelt in supplication to him, so to speak.

Here we have the Gospel of Doubting Thomas. This is Updike at his most outrageous. This is the dry, the wry, the sly John Updike, who as Robert Graves would have cried, warns Thomas "Down, Wanton!" And, Updike revels in the ribald, down and dirty life of Thomas Marshfield, allowing him to create his own Gospel according to Thomas. Did you know that adultery was actually a sacrament sanctioned by Jesus? Why, of course it was! Think! Jesus saved the adulteress from stoning. Think! Ah, Mary Magdalene!

Oh, Domine, Oh Devil, what have you done to my rod and staff? They no longer comfort me. You laugh at me, I'll laugh at you. Repent? Repent, Hell.

A Month of Sundays (1975)is the first novel in what John Updike called his Scarlet Letter trilogy. The concluding volumes are Roger's Version(1986), and S. (1988)

If you read Updike, sex with a capital S is everywhere, and absolutely abundant. After all, wasn't Man told to go forth, be fruitful and multiply? So, Doubting Thomas would preach the Word. In Times Magazine review of Couples, appearing in the issue April 26, 1968, A View From the Catacombs,, the author wrote:

His contemporaries invade the ground with wild Dionysian yelps, mocking both the taboos that would make it forbidden and the lust that drives men to it. Updike can be honest about it, and his descriptions of the sight, taste and texture of women's bodies can be perfect little madrigals.

With A Month of Sundays , Updike offers up a raucous rondeau of sex and religion that rocks the rafters of any sanctuary or temple. With the exception of the fallen, the angels are blushing, but feverishly flipping the pages to find the good parts.

[Cecily · Rating 2 out of 5]

I hadn't read any Updike for years, the premise of this one was appealing (a promiscuous priest, sent away to consider the conflict between his sexual shenanigans and his faith), it was only £2.99 on a charity stall, and I don't have to like the protagonist to like a book, but this... I didn't enjoy it (2*). It was well-written in many ways (3*), but Tom was just too unpleasant. I tried make allowances for different mores, but whereas his misogyny and homophobia would be understandable in a Victorian, this is set within my lifetime (published 1975).

Plot and Structure
Tom is sent away for a month to a place in the desert for errant priests. There doesn't seem to be any therapy or counselling or anything really: just time away to reflect, and encouragement to play golf and poker ("the Bible above all is banned"). He is asked to write his thoughts each day (maybe the others are, but we don't know) so the book has one chapter for each day, with the four that fall on Sundays being like sermons. He muses on how he came to be there, with smatterings about what he's been up to that day. On the final day, it stops, with a final episode that may or may not be true. He occasionally addresses the centre manager, Ms Prynne, who he hopes is reading it, and whom he fancies. It's wry, irreverent, shameless, and, by his own admission, of dubious accuracy.

The way he analyses his own story as he seeks to justify his actions (twisting the Bible to do so), in part by blaming others, brought Humbert Humbert to mind. There is also an echo of Lolita's famous opening lines, "Oh Alicia, my mistress, my colleague, my adviser, my betrayer." He surmises that "I equate noise with [sexual] vitality" and he's "infatuated with completion", but these are not fully developed insights. Occasionally, he detaches, and slips into the third person, and sometimes likens people in his life to "dolls I can play with".

Tom is very well-read and drops lots of literary names in the first half, especially John Barth (who he sees as the epitome of masculinity). Mention of John Dickinson-Carr's idea of many locked rooms is very pertinent to the way Tom tries to compartmentalise his life, but gets only a passing mention. Later, it's his wife Jane who wants "symmetry and enclosure" by having a door to separate the foyer and living room.

He starts an affair with Alicia, his organist, and tries to pair up his wife (Jane) and curate (Ned). This doesn't work ("I thought they might at least fornicate out of conversational boredom"), and Alicia ends up having an affair with Ned, which makes Tom very jealous. He turns to Frankie, but her strong faith makes him impotent, so he has numerous affairs with other parishioners and those who come for counselling. Alicia tells Jane, but somehow Jane takes the upper hand in that discussion and with Tom; briefly, their sex life is wakened. When he sacks Alicia, with Ned's support, she tells one of the church elders. All except Ned have children, yet they barely feature, even from a logistical angle. Tom's own teenage sons are an unpleasant nuisance, "Society... sets a term to childhood; of parenthood there is no riddance."

Twisted Theology
I was raised an Anglican, but have no faith in any higher power now. Nevertheless, the way Tom twists the Bible to show "adultery is our inherent condition" and "not a choice to be avoided; it is a circumstance to be embraced" made me oddly uncomfortable. He goes further, saying people find themselves in adultery (which is fair enough), "stripped of all the false uniforms society has assigned them... The sacrament of marriage... exists but as a precondition for the sacrament of adultery". "Free love is not a scandal but a tautology."

He is uncomfortable with the word "love" but thinks it "the spiritual twin of gravity". At home after the novelty of the revelation of his affair, "weightlessness prevailed".

His persistent impotence with the only lover with any real Christian faith provides suggests he hasn't totally lost longing for his own, "I would greet my impotence as the survivor within me of faith, a piece of purity amid all this relativistic concupiscence."

Misogyny, Sexualising & Homophobia
After years as a conventional priest, husband and father, Tom strays once, and after that, he becomes insatiable. He's largely untroubled by guilt, but he's shocked at women who are similarly free of it. His casual demeaning thoughts about women infuse the book:
* "His wife, dear sainted sloven."
* His mother "was insignificant, timid, mousily miscontented."
* "There is this to be said for cold women: they stick. So beneath our raptures I heard the tearing silk of infidelity" (even though he's the one who is committing adultery).
* "I resent feedback... as a middle-aged woman resents the mirror."
* "The typewriter that like a dull wife has grown grudgingly responsive to my touch."
* "Babies and guilt, women are built for lugging."
He rather relishes exposure of his first affair, because it makes the logistics so much easier.

As sex, rather than God, becomes his world; he sees it everywhere:
* The "flirtatious brushing" of a "naked" branch.
* Typing sounds like "ejaculations of clatter".
* "Newsletters... that pour through a minister's slot like urine from a cow's vulva"!
In footnotes, he draws attention to his numerous Freudian typos.

Better, and more subtle, was the aside that he first saw his wife when she was standing "beneath a blooming fruit tree, a small apple or crabapple."

Outwardly, Tom is uncomfortable around men he suspects are gay ("the sidling fear that any unannounced homosexual puts into me") and assumes they're all feminine with pederast tendencies. He even intuits sexual orientation from how men approach putts and holes in golf. However, there are several suggestions that he feels some attraction to Ned, though is partly a manifestation of jealousy. There is a really weird (trans?) passage where he says one of the reasons he avoids pyjama bottoms (other than ease of masturbatory access) is "to send an encouraging signal to the mini-skirted female who, having bitten a poisoned apple at the moment of my father's progenitive orgasm, lies suspended within me". He also says "Though I like myself in drag, the church is no costume ball", though this comes across as a joke.

To reinforce his general bigotry, there's a casual reference to the "tribal chauvinism of the Jews".

Furniture
Furniture (and the rooms it is in) is explicitly important to Tom, and is often described in delicate detail; he sees more of God in man made objects than the natural world. As a child, the family moved many times, and the furniture was a reassuring constant. "My father's carpentry opened the furniture of my childhood to me and made it religious" and "I had no choice but to follow my father into the ministry; the furniture made me do it."

* "The room still nudges me with its many corners of strangeness."
* He's always been happy in cars, "The first piece of furniture I could drive."

In particular, he always sees stripes on the stairs, suggesting "the great brown back of a slave" and "my own captivity". More poetically, "The oaken staircase flayed with moonbeams."

Furniture is significant in his breakups as well: when one lover leaves, he likens it to removing furniture from the church and with another, he's more concerned that she might lose her rich husband's beautiful furniture than anything else.

Quotes
* "Knives of light fall upon the grapefruit and glass with an almost audible splintering of brightness."
* "The faint rubbed spot on the surface of silence that indicates where voices have been erased."
* "We played in each other like children in puddles."
* "How the world sparkled now that my faith was decisively lost."
* "Morning sunlight streaming, shade-tinted, dust-enlivened, from windows east and south. Snowcrusts from last week's storm visible through them."
* "From the first Thanksgiving, ours is the piety of the full belly. We pray with our stomachs, while our hands do mischief, and our heads indict the universe."
* "I like her fondness for the subject. We are circumscribed by tangents."
* "The demand for babies isn't what it was, though evolutional inertia maintains the orgasm as bribe."
* "The electric sloshing of television's swill."
* "The man knew how to wear authority's spacesuit"!

[brian · Rating 2 out of 5]

a month of Sundays: a cross between winter light (grim bergman movie about a priest who loses his faith) and hot and saucy pizza girls (70s porno)… from some kind of desert sanitarium for holy men gone bad, reverend marshfield writes a memoir about his days of preaching fucking and sucking. one sees where updike was going with all this, but he never gets there. The anguish and frustration is occasionally felt, but for the most part, one imagines the author at his type-writer with half-wood, a smirk, and the desire to shock. montambo refers to this book as 'putrid' -- i don't think i'd even give it so much credit. the nabakovian wordplay and subject matter is fun, but for the most part it's all a bit pointless. check this passage:


“Say you don’t believe in God. Say you think God is an old Israeli fart. Say it.”
She wanted to, she even took breath into her lungs to utter something, but couldn’t.
“How can you believe? How can any sane person?”
“Many do,” she told me. Then amended, “Some do.”
“It’s so ridiculous,” I said. “It’s always been ridiculous. There was this dreadful tribal chauvinism of the Jews. Then some young megalomaniac came along and said, Look at Me. And about a dozen people did. And then… We don’t know what happened, nobody knows, all we know is that as the Roman Empire went rotten one mystery cult prevailed over the many others. People were as messy then as they are now - it could have been any cult. And the damn thing’s still among us. It’s an establishment. A racket. The words are empty. The bread is just bread. The biggest sales force in the world selling empty calories – Jesus Christ. What is it? A detergent? A deoderant? What does it do? This invisible odorless thing?
“It lets people live?”
“It lets them die,” I corrected. “It likes to watch them die.”

…I hit her. First a tap with a cuffed hand, then really a hit, with open palm and stiff wrist so our chamber split at the noise, and all the gossamer threads her love had spun were swept away. “You dumb cunt,” I said, “how can you be so dumb to believe in God the Father, God the Son, and God the Holy Ghost? Tell me you really don’t. Tell me, so I can fuck you. Tell me you know down deep there’s nothing. The dead stink; for a while they stink and then they’re just bones and then there’s not even that. Forever and ever. Isn’t that so? Say it.”
“I can’t”
“Why not, sweet? Why not? Please… …You know there’s nothing. Tell me there’s nothing. Tell me it’s a fraud, I’m a fraud, it’s all right, there’s just us and we’ll die…”

[Bruce Beckham · Rating 1 out of 5]

Imagine Lionel Messi, alone in a gym, with just a ball.

I don’t doubt his skills would be sublime, captivating – indeed teetering tantalisingly upon the very limits of believability.

But probably only watchable for about ten minutes.

Keepy-uppy lacks the narrative of a competitive match.

This is probably why it's not a globally televised sport, while soccer is.

For Messi and ball, substitute Updike and typewriter.

Bring on A Month of Sundays.

And, voila: wordy-uppy. (A crueller critic might say assy-uppy.)

As a No.1 Updike fan, I find such cruelty does not come easily - but by page 20 I couldn't face one more clatter of the keys, or one more ding of the carriage return - I'd had enough words for an entire novel.

And that's enough from me, too.

[Beth · Rating 2 out of 5]

Oh, John Updike. I love him. I hate him. He's brilliant. He's disgusting.

I'm not finishing this book, despite a deep admiration for passages like: "O, that immaculate, invisibly renewed sanitas of rented bathrooms, inviting us to strip off not merely our clothes and excrement and the particles of overspiced flank steak between our teeth but our skin with the dirt and our circumstances with the skin and then to flush every bit down the toilet the loud voracity of whose flushing action so rebukingly contrasts with the clogged languor of the toilets we have left behind at home, already so full of us they can scarcely ebb!"

When pushed beyond that lyrical depth, Updike's writing can start to parody itself — but that's not what put me off this book. It was one of his famously unsexy descriptions of sex. Apologies in advance: "What poetry in virginity!—Jane's little gasp at my shoulder, and her glans-crushing push, and the leaps within her unseen, and the wet revelation of my semen, glutinous in her pussy or glistening on her belly like an iota of lunar spit." Yikes! DNF.

[Rambling Raconteur]

https://youtu.be/Sg1ePV_hk1o?si=bWV3a...

This is not Updike’s strongest novel. There is compulsive wordplay from a narcissistic, unreliable narrator, and there are two clever “sermons” within the story, but the line between character and author blurs too closely without yielding aesthetic rewards.

[Brian Fagan · Rating 3 out of 5]

Does your enjoyment of a favorite author's book sometimes suffer because you expect too much? When I opened John Updike's "A Month of Sundays" and saw that it was written in 1974, I was excited. I've read about three fourths of his novels, and almost all of the ones written before 2000. Thinking about Updike's writing in the 70's brought to mind the Rabbit Angstrom books, and even the 1968 "Couples", my favorite Updike. "A Month of Sundays", the first book in his Scarlet Letter Trilogy, has its moments, but I don't think it compares to his best works.

First I will look at his writing in "A Month of Sundays", and then at stylistic and thematic similarities that this opus shares with his oeuvre. In this story, we are listening to the narration of 41 year-old Reverend Thomas Marshfield. He has just been sent to a monthlong retreat for wayward ministers in the desert southwest. Thus he will be missing a month of Sundays in his pulpit. He was caught having sexual liasons with several women in his church, albeit all consenting adults. Some were seeing him for marital counseling. At the retreat center, reading the Bible and religious discussions are forbidden. There are no visitors or letters. Therapy includes self-realization through daily writing (righting?) and recreation. The novel's structure is that of a recounting of his recent sinful past, interspersed with occasional chapters describing his activities and thoughts at the retreat.

When Updike set out to write a story of a minister derailed by sexual misdeeds ("Elmer Gantry" also comes to mind) he apparently decided to make the telling of it an encyclopedic tour of analogies between religion and sex. Updike can split hairs on the finer points of Christian faith, and I must admit that most of Marshfield's theologic musings were over my head. Amusingly, we find that when Marshfield has just said something "ministerial", his thoughts turn to sex, and when he has just had sex, he seems to refocus on religion. Probably disconcerting but perhaps not unusual. During his sabbatical, he pens sermons that align adultery with the eternal plan of God. He has decided in his ministerial wisdom that Jesus's refusal to condemn the woman apprehended in the act of adultery is evidence that He accepts the practice as a sad but unavoidable condition of humanity. Marshfield has been hoping for a revenge affair on the part of his wife and even subtly encouraging her toward this, because he believes it would halve the guilt he carries.

In "A Month of Sundays" Updike had fun giving his characters rather descriptive names:

The Reverend MARSHFIELD - his faith in God isn't clean, it's all mucked up. He later describes his own "softness... doughiness of the soul that... mires..."

Alicia CRICK (crack) - his organist (she must be an expert with organs) with whom he has an affair.

Mrs. Jane CHILLINGWORTH Marshfield - his wife. Frigid much?

Mrs. HARLOW - another woman he has an affair with. Or should we read "Harlot" or perhaps sex symbol Jean Harlow?

Above all, to me Updike is a master wordsmith. When he describes a setting, I am there - I see it clearly. He takes the time to link his characters' thoughts and actions together with great care. He loves the physical manifestations of the internal. He spends paragraphs detailing a face or a body - their shapes, their oddities, their smells. Phrenologists deduced personality traits from the shape of one's skull. Many Victorians assumed things about people's intelligence and souls from their facial features - forehead, eyes, nose, mouth, chin. Updike imparts the inner from the outer. I think he is ever fascinated by the symmetry and opposites that he sees in the joining of male and female bodies.

Most novels explore many ideas at once. I have the impression that one of Updike's greatest strengths is that his best works feel incredibly unified, in that he generates a lengthy and fascinating story that is truly a treatise centered around one idea.

[Greg · Rating 3 out of 5]

Having just finished Updike's four Rabbit novels, I wanted to try something else by this author. Priced at 25 cents at a used book store, "A Month of Sundays" appeared out of the blue, so why not? I read about 20 pages yesterday, and was ready to throw it in the garbage. The writing seemed ponderously affected with a bit of sex thrown in: perhaps the result of a contest entitled something like "Bad Nabokov". So I read the most recent five reviews here on goodreads, and they averaged three stars, all the way from one star to five stars. I finished "A Month of Sundays" this very Sunday morning, and what a surprise! A group of "fallen" clergymen spend a month at what appears to be a nice golf resort, the downsides twofold: a shortage of female companionship and a wait for the bar to open at noon. Since Updike's character is "not even half queer" his sexual options are limited to self-pleasure and the manager, Ms. Prynne. Deprived also of any religious texts, services, etc., there is only golf, poker, booze, and a convenient typewriter for this book to be written. A sly, strange, subtle comedy, Updike concludes with the same philosophy of Burgess at the end of the original "Clockwork Orange" (not the happy-ever-after added-on "Orange" chapter): the essential sexual nature of a person can't be changed. But we all know this by now, this is the 21st century! However, Updike does explore religious/spiritual concepts more heavily than sexual ones, and this particular exploration is the best part of the book and absolutely worth the read. Thanks to goodreads reviewers, this novel avoided the garbage can.

[Sara S. · Rating 5 out of 5]

Highly memorable, for its clever, goatish, and irreverent protagonist. Written in epistolary form, a conceit I find hard to resist.

[Bob plunkett · Rating 1 out of 5]

could not finish.....terrible

[Eric · Rating 2 out of 5]

Not my least favorite John Updike novel - that’d be Roger’s Version - but this one was tough to get through. There are the usual Updike touchstones: theology (heavy on the Barth), suburban adultery, religion, and golf. I like the journal structure of 31 entries including the four Sunday sermons. I also appreciate the nods to The Scarlett Letter. But while you need to expect a bit of bad sex-writing from this era of Updike, A Month of Sundays is overflowing with it. I guess it’s even more cringey here because, unlike in Couples, for example, the author writes in the first person, as if he were doubly writing for himself.

Updike wrote A Month of Sundays in two months to fulfill a contractual obligation, which may explain the mercifully brief length of 228 pages.

[Alex Johnson · Rating 3 out of 5]

A big ol' "meh" from me. It was too sexual and I didn't find the main character redeeming at all. Maybe if I paid more attention to the theology (or listened to my friends when they said it wasn't worth it), it would have been better.

[Jesse · Rating 5 out of 5]

This novel, a veritable masterpiece of English prose, linguistically decadent and learned in ways only comparable to the best of Nabokov or Joyce, completely upended my negative opinion of John Updike. I deigned to read it for its brevity and plot (resentfully raised Baptist, I love a good apostate narrative), as well as the feeling that Updike, leading man of letters that he was, deserved another chance to carve out a space alongside his contemporaries in my list of beloved writers, but within the first paragraph I was swept away by (or you might say baptized in) his poetic and intricate style, so precariously juxtaposed with its blasphemous content as to make you feel like you’re sinning just by reveling in its beauty, and forgave Updike of all his debts. A new favorite.

[Mike · Rating 3 out of 5]

This took a while to read. It's a hard read morally, and I was wary to enjoy it too much. (If you did not finish this book for moral reasons I find that commendable - something I usually don't for a book.) I think in the end, Updike was playing with us a bit. He turns the table on "you, dear reader" in this novel, especially in the last chapter. He tricks us to think we are observing, only finding out later we are participating. By taking advantage of our propensity for the salacious, he gives us time to realize we aren't much better than the flawed main character. This reveal also takes a turn as the redemption, the unveiling of who he is and who we are in our basest and most selfish desires and doubts. You don't like the character, but you are interested in where his course will take him.

The book is overty sexual. Overbearingly so in many cases. Details of sexual encounters, down to sometimes obscure sensory details, are graphic. I think Updike saw value in doing so. The occurances often come off as juvenile, revealing the sex addicted stunted nature of his main character. And he is indeed a sex addict. He slums boredom and apathy when not on some sexual hunt (or trapped in the confinment of the treatment center), but finds himself full of life in his illicit sexual exploits and pursuits.

Tom Marshfield, a doubting Thomas if ever there was one, also gives sermons throughout his stay at the reform vacaction he is put under. These are full of both cynicism and bright insight. He's aware of his shortcomings, but takes the arrogant tone of one who seemingly doesn't care. There's almost a forcefulness for us to accept it, but no repentance or sorrow on what is occuring. The hypocricy in his doubts and how they are the result, not the cause, of his sexaul dysfunction doesn't hit him. How his adoration of the sexual is a perversion of what should rightfull be adored. Although the author hints maybe he is aware. The narrator can't untangle the two, it's a complex mess, but that is demonstrating the larger issue Updike may have been paying homage to: we ourselves have corrupted adoration of God in exchanged for sex. Like the character, our loss of moral clarity has left us lost; it's hard to find the way out. Updike did a remarkable job capturing the character and dilemma, but like the adoration issue, it's hard to untangle the insightful from the salacious, so hence the 3 stars.

[Elizabeth Moeller · Rating 5 out of 5]

I am not a religious person and so I wasn't sure if I would be able to take much from this story of a minister who has had affairs with multiple members of his congregation and is sent to a desert retreat after being asked to step aside. The minister, in the form of writing a narrative as part of his recuperation, details the acts that have led to him being relieved of his post. However, he also struggles with the internal loss of faith, or at least change in his understanding of faith, which led him to engage in the various actions in which he engaged. In this struggle I found considerations of many of the reasons that I have been disinclined to engage with faith in the first place.
In considering the fate of a fellow minister who took drastic action after his congregation stopped attending, the narrator writes: "Amos and so many other colleagues broken and stranded by the ebbing of faith, seem to me racked upon Calvin's curious transition from the absolute majesty and remoteness of God to the possibility that cleverness and thrift in the management of capital is an earthly sign of divine election". This consideration of the introduction of a worship of capital into the religious realm is something that has often bothered me and I have never seen it expressed more eloquently than here.

[Jamie Howison · Rating 3 out of 5]

I re-read this one (probably 20 years after I first read it...) thanks to a friend calling it "undisguised, misogynistic erotica for male clergy." I strongly disagreed with her, but then said that I would re-read it and then we could talk more. I have to admit I no longer find it quite so powerful a read as I once did...

Yet it was the 70s when Updike wrote this one, and that was an era in which the church had kind of lost the compass in terms of any kind of a healthy perspective on sexuality (and maybe when it came to male clergy, it hadn't yet found the compass?). So in a sense my friend was right; there's an awful lot of seemingly gratuitous and explicit stuff in this book. Still, for this male clergy reader, none of it was particularly erotic or sensual; just sort of sad and misplaced.

Frankly, I still think that seminarians should read this in the company of a wise and critical guide. Part of what Updike knows is that when faced with the dissolution of our ideals, at least some of us will try to find meaning in sexual exploits. At least some of us always have, and always will. Best we be warned.

[Alex Strohschein · Rating 4 out of 5]

I've been wanting to read John Updike for a long time as he is considered one of the most gifted Christian novelists of the 20th century. And indeed he is, though being a mainline Episcopalian, he winks at standard orthodox pieties; he loves (LOVES) Karl Barth but goodness gracious, his protagonist in 'A Month of Sundays' is obsessed with sex.

[Joseph Durham · Rating 4 out of 5]

John Updike's prose, is concisely written, carefully crafted, is poetry in another form. This novel describes a fallen world that continues to be guided by Christian belief. Life is not always a pretty place, but there remain moments of redemption in it, always.

[Amanda · Rating 5 out of 5]

One of the most honest depictions of human weakness ever. Love the humor and genius of his composition.

[Rick Patterson · Rating 3 out of 5]

Imagine The Scarlet Letter but retold from the perspective of Reverend Dimmesdale, and again retold in the voice of Vladimir Nabokov. That's pretty much it. On the one hand, I'm constantly entertained by Updike's sheer exuberance with the language. That's his own love of wordplay and the ongoing challenge of getting a description just exactly specifically right, but it's also, in this case, his homage to Nabokov, and in that case he paints it a little too thick. However, on the other hand, what would be deft asides in Nabokov become rather heavy-handed footnotes, self-conscious and all-too-delighted at the Freudian slips caused by tapping too absent-mindedly on the Remington typewriter. It's all rather clever and produced. But, even so, on the other other hand, it is Updike, and I suspect that his laundry lists would have been engaging reading on a bad day.

[Shane Mclaughlin · Rating 4 out of 5]

I have to applaud Updike for crafting such a vividly pompous and self-absorbed sex freak. The Reverend Tom Marshfield is so in love with his own wit that his written stories and sermons come across as metaphorical masturbation - not to mention the actual masturbation. The main reaction the book got from me was too many eye rolls to count, but overall it was a fun and ridiculous read. Let’s hope another notable Midwestern clergyman is more of an upstanding citizen (though Marshfield is too frequently “upstanding” in another way).

[Vincent · Rating 5 out of 5]

This can't ever become a movie because the church would burn it down but it's a hilarious and perfect little book.
Tom is a minister who is very introspective and very open to sleeping with his congregation.
The best part of course is the way Updike captures emotion and dialogue and human interaction - no gloss on these characters but not too much self pity either.
Just regular people trying to make sense of the world.
Finished it and left it in Wisconsin with a friend

[michal k-c · Rating 3 out of 5]

Real masterclass in Updike’s particularly American baroque style. Some real nice Updike-isms as well — “irony is the style of our cowardice”. In many ways this is a kind of ambivalent attempt at a joke that builds to a bit of a nothing of a punch line. That aside I am of course an Updike apologist and will read just about anything the man published

[Laura · Rating 2 out of 5]

*2.5

[Old Man JP · Rating 3 out of 5]

John Updike is hit and miss for me and this was a miss. It was nicely written but the story and protagonist were not to my liking. The story follows a minister who is sent to a facility for a month because of his obsession with sex. I think that the reason I disliked this so much is because I've known several men like this in real life. Men who claim to be religious but are some of the most disgusting people I've met. In my opinion this is symptomatic to religion in general because when you worship an imaginary deity you can make him conform to whatever belief you choose. This explains why there are so many different versions of Christianity and other religions in existence. If you don't like what one says you can always find one that suits you or even start your own. Thus assuring your salvation.

[Harryjazz pendergrass · Rating 3 out of 5]

Little tedious, almost a pain to get through. Some good moments though