Karma in The Sunbelt S.

By Paul Gray

In Roger's Version (1986), John Updike constructed a plot with some teasing but unacknowledged similarities to Nathaniel Hawthorne's The Scarlet Letter: an unfrocked New England minister named Roger broods over the infidelity of his wife. This time out, the author makes his indebtedness perfectly clear. S., Updike's 32nd book and 13th novel, opens with two quotations from The Scarlet Letter and with a heroine who is an unmistakable incarnation of Hester Prynne, the most famous adulteress in American literature. Sarah Worth (nee Price) boasts a Prynne among her ancestors and, like Hester, a daughter named Pearl. This mother too is a fallen woman, running away from Massachusetts and her physician-husband of some 20 years to join a charismatic Indian guru's ashram in the Arizona desert. After her plane lands in Los Angeles, she relays a message home to her best friend Midge: "I stayed in this motel near the airport in a dreary area called Hawthorne."

Those with a taste for literary allusions will find more to savor here. Names lifted from other Hawthorne novels (Blithedale, Pyncheon) crop up in unexpected contexts; as Sarah seeks her karma in the Sunbelt, she has reason to resent "my old-fashioned Puritan conscience." But Updike's use of such references should not be taken too somberly; the stern, rock-ribbed moral universe of The Scarlet Letter serves here as a subtle counterpoint to a comic vision of anything-goes ethics in mid-1980s America.

The story of Sarah's pilgrimage unfolds through the missives she sends from the ashram: to her husband, daughter, mother, friend, psychiatrist, hairdresser and assorted others. With her nearest and dearest, Sarah fends off recriminations by going on the offense. She hectors her husband about his affairs with his nurses and the upkeep of their house and gardens. She tells Pearl, a Yale undergraduate who is spending a year abroad at Oxford, to avoid English homosexuals and "to concentrate on nice normal boys if you can find any in that dear decadent old country." She accuses her widowed mother living in Florida of financial imprudence and of ruining her skin in the sun: "I was shocked to see how brown you were. You looked dyed, frankly, and with your tinted hair the effect was honestly bizarre."

Sarah's communiques in this temper not only create considerable sympathy for the relatives who receive them but also raise a question. How can this haranguing, materialistic harridan have any genuine interest in the ascetic rituals of Eastern mysticism? An answer of sorts emerges, chiefly in her tape- recorded messages to Midge, her most simpatico correspondent. After all, the two shared the same yoga class back in Swampscott, Mass., and together watched inspirational videocassettes of Shri Arhat Mindadali. Sarah now sees the Arhat in person every day, whizzing by in one of his limousines. She confides, "You wouldn't believe the peace he generates, even at 30 miles an hour." As her initiation into the mysteries proceeds, she begins to master a new way of speaking: "Women are just like men are -- little bits of purusha caught in prakriti, lost and isolated in all that duhkha. Why did it happen?" In her more-enlightened-than-thou euphoria, Sarah even allows herself a deprecating remark about her former yoga instructor, still mired in the dull routines of East Coast life: "Even Irving, I fear, is just playing at dvandvanabhighata -- the cessation of trouble from pairs of opposites."

By her lights, Sarah is serious, but her surroundings decidedly are not. The Ashram Arhat is a scam and a shuck, a hellhole filled with intrigue, backbiting and gobbledygook. "There are no orgies here," Sarah protests to her mother, who has heard otherwise. "There is just love in its many forms." Translation: there are orgies. At a nude sensitivity session, Sarah is smacked in the jaw and nearly raped by a young man. She has a heterosexual and then a lesbian affair and is eventually seduced by the great leader himself. The Arhat is interested in the conspicuous consumption of women, money and fame: "I wish to be on this John Carson show, as an amusing guest. I think he reaches many people of the night and thus he will re-energize our field." Thanks to her intelligence, a lonely virtue at the ashram, Sarah eventually becomes the Arhat's executive assistant, dealing with debts that may run as high as $50 million.

S. stands an excellent chance of enraging those people, a stampeding herd in these prickly, litigious times, who believe that fiction should glow with universal tolerance and offend no one in the process. Updike will be charged, incorrectly, with mocking religions and practices outside the Judeo-Christian tradition. In truth, he simply points out the absurd hybrids that result when East and West meet and cross-pollinate. The humor is at the expense not of Buddha but of a place of spiritual purification that also contains a disco and a boutique. Others will claim that Updike is up to the same trick he was accused of in The Witches of Eastwick (1984), namely, giving females enough freedom to make absolute fools of themselves. Wrong again. Sarah survives the shocks and numerous surprises of her ordeal in fine fettle. She may never know just how funny some of her escapades were, unless, of course, she can reassemble all her letters and peruse them at leisure. Or, even more conveniently, read S. and laugh out loud.