Customer Reviews

A Month of Sundays: A Novel

5 star:		(5)
4 star:		(3)
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2 star:		(3)
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When the Reverend Thomas Marshall is busted for philandering with more than one of his buxom parishoners, he's dispatched by his bishop to a desert sanitorium for forty days of reflection, recuperation and golf. His carer, Ms Prynne, suggests he write as a form of therapy and this novel consists of Marshall's morning writing exercises and four sermons which he writes on Sundays. He recounts his recent past, the infidelities which led him here, reflecting on the joys of the flesh and the agonies of the spirit. In so doing, he also embarks on a cunning seduction of Ms Prynne... This is a wonderfully clever comic novel. It's rich with layers of symbolism and Biblical references - the Omega-shaped sanitorium, the forty days and nights in the desert - and bubbles along with puns, comic typographical errors, plus arch footnotes and endless wisecracks. It's beautifully plotted, impeccably structured, and like most of Updike's work, it's laugh-out-loud funny but utterly serious in its intent. It's an exploration of the nature and challenges of religious faith in contemporary America. The "sermons" are spectacular examples of the way we can reason the Bible into meaning anything - we can even turn adultery into the purpose of marriage and the key to fulfilling one's human destiny. Updike's control of language is astonishing - some reviewers find it confounding but they lack the patience to read this book slowly, to savour it like a seduction, to enjoy it as it was meant to be enjoyed. When you look back, you realize how meticulously crafted it's all been, and you're dazzled not only by that craftsmanship but also by how lightly it wears the weight. Updike's touch is deft, subtle and most of all incredibly funny.

I found this book absolutely amazing. Though the Rev. Tom Marshfield is utterly despisable, he is also completely endearing. The prose is masterfully written. I only found it difficult during the first 3 pages. Updikes knowledge of theology impressed me, as well as his indepth treatment of the subject. Updikes juxtapositioning of sex (seen usually as profane) and theology gives this novel its unique edge. Highly recommended reading for anyone who has dared to ask the hard questions of religion and to search them out, and has suffered morally and spiritually as a result.

For those of you who have come to admire Updike's work, especially from the Rabbit Series, this novel will come as a disappointment. The story of Reverend Tom Marshfield whose sexual escapades with his parishioners causes many problems and eventully lands him in a place to be rehabilitated so that he can return to his church revitalized and purged of his wanton desires leaves much to be desired.

I had many problems getting into the novel - Updike seems to preoccupied with trying to establish Tom as a very astute and observant character with many insights into religion and life. Like with many novels that try to create unique and interesting perspectives, I found the text a little dull with nothing to entertain. If I wanted a diatribe on different subjects, I would buy a collection of essays. I found that Updike fails to have us really care or empathize with Tom's perspective (something Coetzee does marvelously in a similar novel Elizabeth Costello) so any rant he goes on comes off as unwanted. The middle of the text is where things pick up, when we finally find out what series of events leads to Tom being in the position he is in. For awhile, I couldn't put the book down as I raced through scenes of Tom coming to grips with his desires and needs, only to find the end of the novel return to the plodding pace that made the beginning so dull.

Stylistically , Updike is a writing master, as his prose is clear and succinct. It's a pleasure to read the way he constructs sentences. It's a shame that it's wasted on this somewhat problematic story.

Updike is not usually this difficult to read. In terms of its prose, this is one of his more spectacular, elusive and confusing books. A lot of the time, this book reminded me more of Anthony Burgess than John Updike. What is distinctively Updikian about it is its engagement with certain problems in the Christian faith. Among the questions the book seems to ask are: Is God detectable or undetectable in the fabric of our lives? Why does God apparently allow suffering (that old chestnut)? Above all: what exactly is the relationship between Christianity and sexuality? Is sex sacred or prophane? The book answers and fails to answer all these questions and more in its complex, uncertain unravelling. I myself did not really feel adequate to its challenge and I did find the language pitched too high for me. But it's a fascinating book all the same.

As with all, or most, Updike books, overwritten ad nauseum. Updike, for all his critical acclaim, always seems to be writng to impress someone. The reader? Unfortunately not. Most likely, Updike himself

It is obvious from reading Updike that his life was consumed by two things-sex and golf--and he overwrites both.

This book is about a 41-year old oversexed preacher who is questioning his faith and is ultimately defrocked after numerous relationships with women of the church. And as you might imagine, golf is part of his therapy.

Even though the book is overwritten, there are some great lines, as Updike always seems to produce, and these make the book worth reading. A few examples:

--"We can't be saints all the time. The Lord would get bored..."

--When does an empire begin to die? When its privileged citizens begin to disdain war..."

--"I missed three consecutive putts of less than three feet, indicating either emergent astigmatism or a severe character defect..."

If it's Updike and a minister-in-crisis you want, read the book. You may like it.

But if its sex you want, try Brewster Milton Robertson's "A Posteruing of Fools." The sex is better and the golf is, too!!!

I have decided that I just don't like the works of John Updike. Though he's a whiz with language and knows a lot about theology and philosophy, his ideas about masculinity, sex, love and need are abhorrent to me. He places women in a role where their only option is to 'ascend' to man's carnal desire, to become victims of the human plight which we are all heir to.

This story is set in a parish and deals with a minister who becomes defrocked because of promiscuous behavior with his parishioners. Updike appears to idolize adultery and the need for sexual exploration/exploitation at the expense of sensitivity growth and responsibility.

This is a fabulous book. It marries esoteric philosophy and ultimate, base humanity better than any book I've ever read. This combination gives it the ammunition to truly shoot to the core of a reader. And I found it quite easy to read.

John Updike pours words out like poetry as he portrays the life of a pastor who found love outside of wedlock. In its time, I think this book would be viewed as vulgar and even heretical, but now, it's a fun adventure full of hilarity and wit... just be sure to have a dictionary next to you--his sesquipedalism is quite hard to follow at times.

As usual, John Updike does not disappoint. This book will slowly draw you in and at times you wonder if you are disgusted with the protagonist or do you feel sorry for him (much like Humbert in Lolita). Then there are times that you feel you are being gas-lighted and seduced. The book touches deeply on human nature and the addiction to the sexual drive. I would recommend it as an easy read, especially for John Updike aficionados.

"A Month of Sundays" gives a first-glance 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. After reaching 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.

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.

The right Rev. 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. 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:

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."