A Keyboard Confessional

ALFRED KAZIN GAVE Updike "an A-plus" for his last novel, calling him "a sociologist of all this new American territory." Updike deserved it--as a chronicler of suburbia he is unsurpassed. But a sociologist is something different from a novelist. He is an onlooker--in Updike's case, a perceptive and entertaining one--and he watches from a safe distance. The artist who stands removed from the scene and the people he describes risks losing a gut sensibility that a sociologist, after all, has no use for.

Updike speaks of 'Rabbit' Angstrom in a detached way: Rabbit was "happy working in Mrs. Smith's garden." He "pined after an animal existence." Updike wouldn't be, and doesn't. The dust jacket photo for A Month of Sundays shows him in a pin-stripe suit and shiny black shoes, flashing a tolerant half-smile at his walking companion, who has been cut from the picture. He holds two crisp autographed copies of his latest book under his left elbow, while his left hand absently attends to an itch on his right pinky.

It is not a picture of Rabbit Angstrom, and it is not really a picture of the Reverend Thomas Marshfield, the hero of this new book. But Marshfield has more of John Updike in him--the Updike who doesn't long for an animal existence and doesn't mind living in New York City--than the mute heroes of half a dozen of his previous novels.

Mute, because Updike told their stories from a distance, not trusting in first person narrators. Lately Updike has tried to say things that cannot be said in a neutral, realistic narration, things that sound intrusive from an impersonal narrator.

Only Bea's presence, a circle like the mouth of a while bell of which her overheard voice was the chiming clapper, promised repose. Hanema remembered her as a calm pool in which he could kneel to the depth of his navel.

Whose poetry is that? Piet Hanema doesn't have it in him, and Updike is supposed to be minding his own business in the background. In A Month of Sundays, Marshfield is the poet.

UPDIKE APPARENTLY feels obligated to justify a first-person narration with some explanation of how the words got onto the paper. This kind of feeling has afflicted other 20th century writers, and sometimes it leads to contrived situations. Take this one, for example: The Reverend Marshfield suffers from "distraction." As a cure, his bishop orders him to spend a month in the desert, atoning. But this being truly the latter age, ascetism is not what it once was, and Marshfield gets to expiate his sins in fairly comfortable surroundings--a motel, actually. He is forbidden serious "intrapersonal or doctrinal" conversation, non-escapist reading material, and the Word of God as set down in Holy Scriptures (Marshfield doesn't miss the irony of his situation--who ever heard of a motel without Bibles?) His nights are to be devoted to poker, his days to golf. (You have to imagine that his motel is situated in a large oasis.) Above all, and this is where the real expiation comes in. Marshfield must spend his mornings writing on a topic of his own choosing. A sort of keyboard confessional, and a sort of novel, in 31 short chapters.

Left alone, the frame-tale would be quaintly implausible, but the chapters devoted to golf and poker with the boys (errant clerics all) have a disconcerting tacked-on quality. Not that they are without point:

Golf is as if were all bones, an instant chastener and teacher: lessons show through, shapely as the graphs of binomial equations, that would hide forever amid the muffling muscle of lived life's muddle.

A born preacher. Marshfield comes to his writing role out there in the desert as an amateur, but with the sensibilities of someone who has been working with words for a long time. It doesn't take him long, telling his own story, to discover the joys of writing fiction.

This is fun! First you whittle the puppets, then you move them around.

The story is familiar enough. Marshfield's "distraction," as Updike fans have already guessed, took the form of a too-enthusiastic ministering to the sheep of his flock. And if Marshfield's wife and mistresses are puppets, at least they are well-carved, and skillfully handled.

WHAT IS MORE, this beginner likes words even better than people. He is no Russian emigre, but he has a distinctly Nabokovian penchant for treating words like butterflies with a giddy life of their own. His conceits are playful:

Masturbation! Thou saving grace-note upon the baffled chord of self.

He delights in Freudian analysis of typographical slips of the finger, and points out tiresome puns at every opportunity. He even plays word golf, like Nabokov's Kinbote, only not as well: Golf, gold, good, gods, nods, nous, gnus, anus, Amos. "Eight strokes with some cheating and a one putt." It is as if Updike has been suppressing all this game-playing for years as self-indulgent and inappropriate, and now he has discovered the perfect way out--he can pin it on Marshfield in the name of character development.

There is something irreligious in all this emphasis on Marshfield as author, and something dangerously athilistic. Marshfield takes his creator image too seriously for a humble servant of God--his apostasy is in his arrogance, more than his adultery. But Marshfield is sincerely religious, and this novel lives on the tension between his doubt and his belief, between his fear of "the universal nullity" and

a plain suspicion that someone in the immediate vicinity immensely, discreetly cares. God.

EVERY SUNDAY (there are no calendars, but he manages to keep track) Marshfield writes a sermon.

The first one is a paean to adultery, and a clever rationalization of the violability of the seventh commandment. It's not much else, but the sermons are supposed to get better as the month goes on. The second begins with an examination of some New Testament miracles and unfolds into an elegant defense of evil as "essential to a Creation of differentiated particulars." But again, he ends with apostasy, cursing his "docile suburban flock".

We are demand, I cure you, than, as our Lord cursed the fig treat may you depart from this place forever sterile may your generation either at the roots, and a better be fed by its rot.

Amen.

But in the end he is able to bless his congregation, in a sermon on a text from Corinthians, "we are of all men most miserable." It is a triumph of faith, in a godless time, from the unlikeliest of believers.

Those of us who live in the irrational may moderate our shame. Who has set us here, in this vocation, at this late date, out of due time? To all the question is to imply an answer there: is a qui, a Who, who has set; we have not accidently fallen, we have been placed. As of course we already know in our marrow.

What keeps this book from being more than an interesting and sometimes affecting experiment is Updike's unwillingness to cut himself off from the conventions of realism. The half-hearted word games, the tired ecclesiastical jokes, the shallow plot, are all consistent with a vision of Marshfield as a frustrated author given his big chance, but they are unnecessary. Marshfield's anomalous faith gives him a depth, and a dignity, that makes the rest extraneous and distracting. The mediocre sermon early in the month is realistically valid, but artistically wrong. As something written to a preacher in a desert motel, it is revealing and effective. But it is mediocre writing nonetheless, and that is not Marshfield's name on the dust jacket.