Weekend Guide: 03.11.2022

a month of sundays 🌙

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

- Beth, goodreads reviewer who did not finish ‘A Month of Sundays’

As I consider embarking on the final leg of the Rabbit journey, i’ve zagged into even weirder Updike territory - A Month of Sundays.

Reverend Tom Marshfield, after fucking seemingly every woman in his congregation, is sent away to a desert retreat, a clerical rest home - a spiritual spa. Whatever you want to call it, he must spend the month away in sun-soaked penance. Mornings are spent writing. Afternoons are for golf, drinking and playing poker with fellow penitents. The required weekly journals are what make up the 31 chapters - Updike’s nod to The Scarlet Letter.

Forgive me my denomination and my town; I am a Christian minister, and an American. I write these pages at some point in the time of Richard Nixon's unravelling. Though the yielding is mine, the temptation belongs to others: my keepers have set before me a sheaf of blank sheets--a month's worth, in their estimation. Sullying them is to be my sole therapy.

Tom, our narrator, like all Updike protagonists, is a real piece of shit. Beyond reproach. A Month of Sunday’s is his confession. His sermons of truth, his grapplings with god and his insatiable appetite for sex.

The only Paradise we can imagine is this Earth. The only life we desire is this one. Paul is right in his ghoulish hope, and all those who offer instead some gaseous survival of a personal essence, or one’s perpetuation through children or good deeds or masterworks of art, or identification with the race of Man, or the blessedness of final and absolute rest, are tempters and betrayers of the Lord. Is not the situations in our churches indeed that from the pulpit we with our good will and wordy humanism lean out to tempt our poor sheep from those scraps of barbaric doctrine, preserved in the creed like iguanodon footprints in limestone, that alone propel them up from their pleasant beds on a Sunday morning?

Yet the resurrection of the body is impossible.

But, don’t you know - without sin there would be no redemption.

In what the New York Times termed schizophrenic word salads, Updike, the master stylist, really takes you on a ride.

Alert. Alert. This is a very hate-able book. If you are a fan of writing, this one will fuck you up. Make you feel insignificant. And leave you feeling like you need to catch up. To what? An idling genius.

The aforementioned 1975 NYT review put a nice bow on it. “Mr. Updike is lounging in his own backyard, enjoying a day off from his strenuous job of being one of our best writers.”

Links:

Cormac McCarthy is publishing two new novels in the fall

Emil Amos’ Drifter’s Sympathy is back after a long hiatus

They found Shackleton’s‘Endurance’ in Antartica after 107 years - I wrote about ‘Endurance’ a while ago.

Bandsplain did a 4 1/2 hour deep dive on 311

You can now read Weekend Guide in the new Substack app for iPhone.