Status
Genres
Collection
Publication
Description
In this antic riff on Hawthorne's Scarlet Letter, the Reverend Tom Marshfield, a latter-day Arthur Dimmesdale, is sent west from his Midwestern parish in sexual disgrace. At a desert retreat dedicated to rest, recreation, and spiritual renewal, this fortyish serial fornicator is required to keep a journal whose thirty-one weekly entries constitute the book you now hold in your hand. In his wonderfully overwrought style he lays bare his soul and his past--his marriage to the daughter of his ethics professor, his affair with his organist, his antipathetic conversations with his senile father and his bisexual curate, his golf scores, his poker hands, his Biblical exegeses, and his smoldering desire for the directress of the retreat, the impregnable Ms. Prynne. A testament for our times.… (more)
User reviews
The vocabulary was brilliant: too much so.
The pacing was brilliant: it blinded me at times with changes.
Too much brilliance can sometimes be a challenge.
The other favorite son of Updike tells his teacher father's story in The Centaur.
This one chooses as protagonist that icon of American culture--but not of American lit--the protestant preacher. Updike is no
theological homework, fills his book with ironies of free will and predetermination, democracy and authority, sexual ennui and community existentialism.
As the Centaur may be the best American novel on education, this may be the best on religion,
though Bellow has a few rivals, from Mr Sammler to Ravelstein and the Dean's December on education
particularly.