Ipswich Public Library

A month of Sundays, John Updike. --

eng

novels

A month of Sundays

John Updike. --

John Updike's seventh novel concerns a month of seventh days, a month of enforced rest and recreation as experienced by the Reverend Tom Marshfield, sent west from his Midwestern church in disgrace. The rules of the desert retreat, an omega-shaped motel brusquely managed by the impregnable Ms. Prynne, forbid religion, demand that games be played all afternoon and evening, and ask that the morning be spent in writing ad libidum. In his wonderfully overwrought style the errant cleric spills day by day his confession - his boyhood in a parsonage, his marriage to the daughter of his ethics professor, his seduction of his organist, his antipathetic conversations with his senile father and his bisexual curate (both doctrinal liberals, which Marshfield is not), his golf scores, his poker hands, his Biblical exegeses, his faith. A testament for our times. -- from book jacket