Catholic Fiction

reviewed by John Murphy

The Sacred and the Profane

A Month of Sundaysgives the initial impression of being a tossed-off trifle, as if a bit of Updike’s light verse had grown fat and sassy, full-bellied, and was given room to stretch like a self-satisfied cat on a windowsill. Updike, already a luminary of American letters by the book’s publication in 1975, had good cause to lie back and bask in the glow. By then he had established his literary reputation with a series of lyrical, lovingly observed novels of middle-class, middle-American life, including such masterpieces as Rabbit, Run (1959), The Centaur (1963), and the controversial Couples (1968).

After straining to reach the pinnacle of bookish prestige (which included a Guggenheim Fellowship in 1959 and a National Book Award for The Centaur), Updike opted to indulge his less sober-minded self with this arch and witty first-person narrative from the perspective of a man who shares Humbert-Humbert’s literary, if not sexual, tendencies. Indeed, A Month of Sundays nods to Nabokov in its delight in puns, wordplay, mental calisthenics, and self-confessional musings, while still featuring the dominant themes and characteristics of Updike’s prose.   

The author’s mouthpiece is one Revered Tom Marshfield, the minister of a New England parish who exhibits an Updikean capacity for close observation, philosophical speculation, psychological penetration, and penetration of another kind all together. We find him on the first page settling down with a sheaf of blank sheets of paper—a month’s worth. “Sullying them is to be my sole therapy,” Marshfield writes, already indicating the thematic and aesthetic direction the novel will take with the sole/soul pun, not to mention the verb “to sully,” foreshadowing Marshfield’s association of writing with sex and seduction.

The month’s worth of paper is provided for him by the keepers of a desert “resort” for clerics fallen on hard times. Pederasts, adulterers, alcoholics, gamblers, and disbelievers – a whole spectrum of sinners united under the banner of the Christian collar. “The month is to be one of recuperation,” Marshfield observes, “—as I think of it, ‘retraction,’ my condition being officially diagnosed as one of ‘distraction.”

‘Distraction’ indeed—Reverend Marshfield seems distracted by anything standing on two legs with a pair of breasts. His distraction, so termed, precipitated a string of affairs with a wide swathe of the female members of his congregation. His bishop imposed a discreet exile for the Rev. Tom in a remote sanatorium. Writing is part of his therapy, and thus the novel begins with our prophet in the desert.

Here’s the format, then, neatly laid out: thirty-one chapters, one for each day of a month, with each chapter comprising a morning’s worth of Tom Marshfield’s musings on the subjects of life, death, sex, God, husbands and wives, adultery, Karl Barth, fathers and sons, faith, skepticism, Christianity, and how a man may be defined by his golf swing. Yes, we are in Updike territory.        

His protagonist summarizes his situation thus:

“A man publicly pledged to goodness and fidelity scorns his wife, betrays one mistress, is impotent with another, exploits the trust and unhappiness of some who come to him for guidance, regards his father and his sons as menacing foreign objects, and through it all evinces no distinct guilt but rather a sort scrabbling restiveness, a sense of events as a field of rubble in which he is empowered to search for some mysterious treasure.”    

That last clause neatly encapsulates Updike’s particular charism as a writer. Life is the “field of rubble” and Updike intrepidly searches in supple sentences for the “mysterious treasure” that is Beauty in the everyday. Beauty is a spiritual presence in the sometimes dusty, dreary facts of existence. His protagonist’s longing for erotic consummation seems like a sublimated desire for salvation, for some brief touch of transcendence. Like all heresies, there’s a kernel of truth in Updike’s understanding of the relationship between the sexual and the spiritual. John Paul II’s Theology of the Body explored and deepened our understanding of sexuality’s spiritual dimension—namely, as the expression of love between husband and wife committed to each other and to God through the sacrament of marriage.       

Yet marriage is death, not life, to most Updike antiheroes. Marshfield admits as much in one of his unguarded chapters. Every seventh chapter, a Sunday, Marshfield gives a sermon. Preaching, with its aspect of performance, dramatic language, and spiritual authority, seems to appeal to Updike as a specifically Christian writer and thinker. He included a lengthy sermon in his latest novel, Terrorist, delivered by a charismatic preacher in a decrepit New Jersey church. As a literary critic, Updike has always evinced a dexterous talent for teasing meaning from a text. What text is richer than the Bible? Marshfield’s exegesis, however, is less about truth than it is about twisting the Bible to suit his own needs and neuroses. In one chapter he concludes:

“Verily, the sacrament of marriage, as instituted in its adamant impossibility by our Saviour, exists but as a precondition for the sacrament of adultery. To the one we bring token reverence, and wooden vows; to the other a vivid reverence bred upon the carnal presence of the forbidden, and vows that rend our hearts as we stammer them. The sheets of the marriage bed are interwoven with the leaden threads of eternity; the cloth of the adulterous couch with the glowing, living filaments of transience, of time itself, our element, our only element, which Christ consecrated by entering history, rather than escaping it, as did Buddha.”

Marshfield admits that contorting the Gospel to legalistically absolve him of his sins is mental masturbation, a symptom of the condition that brought disgrace on his parish and landed him in a desert resort to recuperate from his spiritual ailments. But considering the persistence of adultery as a narrative and thematic device in Updike’s fiction, there is a sense that the author himself views marital infidelity as a sacrament of sorts, a means of being tangibly “of time itself, our element.” Wives in Updike’s novels (Janice in the Rabbit series, for example, or Angela in Couples) are harbingers of Death to their husbands—men who fear negation above all things. One must be careful to consider Updike in his proper light as artist, not as a theologian – his religion is heretical, but his art is compelling. Unlike Philip Roth, Updike’s contemporary, Updike does not disdain religion but grapples with it; he struggles in his fiction to reconcile the tangible reality of sin with the promise of salvation via the “in time” reality of Christ’s earthly tenure.    

Faith breaks through like faint light through a grimy window. Guilt will not abandon Marshfield. When he is struck impotent with one of his mistresses, he embraces the condition as “the survivor within me of faith, a piece of purity amid all this relativistic concupiscence, this plastic modernity, this adulterate industry, this animated death.” Marshield spirals inwards towards the center of his marshy confusion, arriving at the edge of self-understanding but never quite there. In a Graham Greene-like formulation, Updike equates faith to being hunted by God, “a feeling of being closely, urgently cherished by a Predator, whose success will have something rapturous about it, even for me.”

A Month of Sundays is a heavy meal served in dainty dishes on fine China. The prose sparkles, even if the Nabokovian wordplay is occasionally strained. Updike sounds every note in his repertoire, and the result is a Bach-like sonata—breezy, unassuming, consummately professional, but also witty, intellectual, and profound in passages.

The book is most explicitly a metaphor for the sometimes flirtatious relationship between the writer and his or her imaginary audience – a solicitous, needy relationship. Like the fat cat in the windowsill, Updike’s prose preens, seems anxious to impress. We discover that Marshfield ultimately has an audience of two: himself, and the prim and proper Ms. Prynne—that’s right…shades of The Scarlet Letter!—overseer of the fallen clergy during their “vacation.” This is the woman, we discover, to whom his chapters are addressed. What we’ve been reading is a seduction disguised as a self-confession, and Ms. Prynne is the reader’s symbolic stand-in (or is it the other way round?). Like Richard III’s wily courtship of Lady Anne, Updike courts us with a character who is lascivious, solipsistic, spiteful, and unlikable. But the witty charm of his dazzling writing style wins us over.  And for the discerning reader, A Month of Sundays serves as a kind of Rosetta Stone for Updike’s fiction, an index pointing to all his chief concerns, themes, and character types.   

Here are a few nuggets of the Wit and Wisdom of John Updike on display in A Month of Sundays:

On parenthood: “Society in its conventional wisdom sets a term to childhood; of parenthood there is no riddance. Though the child be a sleek Senator of seventy, and the parent a twisted husk mounted in a wheelchair, the wreck must still grapple with the ponderous scepter of parenthood.”

On American religiosity: “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.”

On Love: “Let us think of it as the spiritual twin of gravity—no crude force, “exerted” by the planets in their orbits, but somehow simply, Einsteinly there, a mathematical property of space itself. Some people and places just make us feel heavier than others, is all.”