Ring Around the Collar

By Paul Gray

A MONTH OF SUNDAYS

by JOHN UPDIKE 228 pages. Knopf. $6.95.

After years of dutifully ministering to his flock, the Rev. Thomas Marshfield, 41, begins fleecing the ewes. When his trysts with the church organist and other assorted supplicants are exposed, Marshfield is shipped West for a month's rest to a desert spa for troubled clergymen. The regimen is ecumenical. There is golf in the afternoon, poker at night and daiquiris whenever. Mornings are spent alone at an obligatory typewriter, where orgies of therapeutic confession are the order of the day.

As his 31-day story reveals, Marshfield is a stock character from Updike's central casting. He snorts at liberal Protestantism and pumps for devotion inspired by awe and terror ("Mop up spilt religion! Let us have it in its original stony jars or not at all!"). At the same time he pushes graphic, adulterous sex as suburbia's best anodyne; coupling is sweetest with the ashen taste of sin. He sees women chiefly as attractive hurdles in the heavenly sweepstakes, where all the runners are male.

To perk up this familiar rehash, Updike gives his clergyman a bag of Nabokovian wordplays and tries to pass him off as Humbert Humbert (in Lolita, Humbert observed, "You can always count on a murderer for a fancy prose style"). Marshfield rattles off alliterations as if he were on death row. He describes a local nursery "which piously kept its Puerto Rican peony-pluckers in a state of purposeful peonage." With nary a blush he writes of returning home to the "fusty forgiveness of my fanlighted foyer." His frequent dissections of sex and theology revolve around a central question: How many matrons can dance on the head of a pun? "More power to the peephole!" the Rev. Marshfield exults after describing a session of spying on his curate and his mistress of the moment.

Before long, Marshfield's worst problem seems to be a case of terminal cuteness. Unlike Humbert, he is not facing a murder trial. He is passing through a clerical dude ranch, free to resume his pallid philandering as soon as he leaves.

Updike is too talented to write un distinguished fiction, and A Month of Sundays contains more than its share of finely wrought apercus: "In the end, fashion overcomes personality: all the mistresses of Louis XV look alike."

Marshfield's sermons (he writes one each Sunday of his stay) are slypastich es of biblical scholarship and sophistry.

Few writers can be as entertainingly cerebral as Updike. Yet after nearly two decades of distinguished service as the thinking man's John O'Hara, Updike seems to have reported everything he knows about the sexually tormented middle class. The ground covered in A Month of Sundays is fast becoming scorched earth.

Paul Gray

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