A Month of Sundays by John Updike

First published: 1975

Type of plot: Theological romance

Time of work: The mid-1970’s

Locale: Primarily the midwestern United States

Principal Characters:

• The Reverend Tom Marshfield, the narrator, banished by his bishop to a rehabilitation home for errant clergymen
• Jane Marshfield, his wife
• Alicia Crick, the organist in Tom’s church and his mistress for a short time, a divorcée with two small children
• Ned Bork, Tom’s assistant pastor and his replacement as Alicia’s lover
• Mrs. Harlow, a parishioner whose affair with Tom leads to his disgrace
• Ms. Prynne, the matron of the rehabilitation home, who steps into the novel only on the last two pages but is the object of many of Tom’s thoughts

The Novel

A Month of Sundays takes its title from the thirty-one days the Reverend Tom Marshfield is ordered to spend in enforced rest and recreation in a motel retreat somewhere in the Southwestern United States. He is on a strict schedule, enforced by Ms. Prynne, the tight-lipped manager, requiring a full morning of writing to be followed by games in the afternoons and evenings. Thus, A Month of Sundays is divided into thirty-one sections, each one representing a morning’s prose, and together they make up an autobiographical sketch of Tom Marshfield in prose that swoops and veers.

All of Tom’s life has been lived in a context of church work and the ministry. He is the son of a pastor, and he grew up in a parsonage, went to a theological seminary, and married the daughter of his ethics professor. He is not, however, comfortable and at ease in his faith; as a parson, he is, in his own words, “not a hunting one, but a hunted.” Tom’s organist, Alicia Crick, tells him that he is the “angriest sane man” she has ever met—her prompt diagnosis is a bad marriage—and that although he is a married man he still burns. His answer is immediate: “She was right.” From that point on—the time is early in Lent—their affair is fated, and they go to bed together for the first time soon after Easter.

Tom and Alicia’s sexual rage for each other consumes them. Tom explains, “At last I confronted as in an ecstatic mirror my own sexual demon.” The inevitable result is Alicia’s wish to have Tom all to herself, his refusal to leave his family and the ministry, and the collapse of their affair with much bitterness on Alicia’s part. During his passion for Alicia, Tom had tried to encourage as subtly as he could a romantic relationship between his wife, Jane, and Ned Bork, his young assistant minister: “I did not, even in my lovelorn madness, imagine that she and Ned would marry; but perhaps they would clasp long enough to permit me to slip out the door with only one bulky armload of guilt.” Nothing happens between Ned and Jane, however, and Tom sinks to the humiliating behavior of a Peeping Tom who spies on Ned and Alicia. Tom is distracted from his jealousy by an affair with Frankie Harlow, but her faith and his anger combine to unman him, and when the scorned Alicia betrays Tom to Frankie Harlow’s husband, he then receives his orders from the bishop to report to Ms. Prynne’s rest home for delinquent clerics.

Besides this account of his sexual careering, Tom also writes of his sad relationship with his seventy-seven-year-old father, who broods his life away in a senile rage at ghosts from his past and does not recognize his son. Tom’s friendships with his fellow sinners under Ms. Prynne’s care center on their golf and poker games, minor strands in the total narrative.

Tom lards his thirty-one-day assignment heavily with theological speculations. His father and Ned are both doctrinal liberals, whereas Tom is a conservative who takes it hard that “the androgynous homogenizing liberals of the world are in charge.” He tells Ned, “All I know is that when I read Tillich and Bultmann I’m drowning. Reading Karl Barth gives me air I can breathe.” These preferences translate into a choice of faith over good works and a suspicion of all versions of Utilitarianism. Tom’s intransigence in the face of liberal social policies appears in his conviction that “most of what we have is given, not acquired; a gracious acceptance is our task, and a half-conscious following-out of the veins of the circumambient lode.”

As Tom writes on, morning after morning, he begins to be conscious of Ms. Prynne, hoping to get her attention. He leaves each day’s ad libidum offering on the dresser top where she can read it, and he importunes her to grant him a sign. By the twenty-ninth day he is pleading with her, on the thirtieth day he is cursing her, and on day thirty-one he describes the revelation that has come to him. It is a passage that must be read carefully in the context of Tom’s two hungers, for women and for faith.

The Characters

The Reverend Tom Marshfield’s bold confession of his sexual history reveals an extraordinary sensibility. He details his infidelities candidly, explicating his intimacies in vivid pictures and holding back no secrets about his voyeurism and compulsive masturbation. The story is so complete, the concern so obsessive, that it is natural to look in Tom’s sexual behavior for some deeper significance. Tom gives the answer himself on the first day of his enforced self-scrutinies: “In my diagnosis I suffer from nothing less virulent than the human condition, and so would preach it.” Many readers will resist this view of things, accusing Tom of rationalizing away his lapses into sin and reading Updike’s intention as the deliberate creation of a hypocrite. Yet taking Tom’s declaration at face value contributes to a consistent interpretation, for he becomes a searcher after God whose carnal questing is emblematic of his larger spiritual yearning.

Tom explains that being born a minister’s son made his life “one long glad feast of inconvenience and unreason.” In his father’s house, he says, he learned to read and dream on the parlor sofa, itself “stuffed with the substance of the spirit.” The furniture gave evidence of a “teleologic bias in things,” and it was the furniture, Tom confides, that led him to the ministry. In seminary he read Karl Barth and became a Barthian out of “positive love of Barth’s voice.” Tom is contemptuous of the “fine-fingered finicking” of “doddering Anglican empiricists,” being drawn instead to the excitement of Søren Kierkegaard and Fyodor Dostoevski’s Grand Inquisitor. He exclaims, “Where is the leap! the abyss! the black credibility of the deus absconditus!” For Tom the existentialist, God is immanent in the physical and the immediate; he wonders if the appellation “sex object” is not the “summit of homage.” In all of this, Tom’s detractors will find only more bad faith, but Tom’s personal creed is very clear to him: “Away with personhood! Mop up spilt religion! Let us have it in its original stony jars or not at all!”

Exercises 6, 13, 20, and 27 are written on Sundays and are thus cast as sermons. Tom chooses texts and themes inspired by his predicament, and he is at his most eloquent as he preaches on adultery and miracles. On the sixth day he takes as his text John 8:11, “Neither do I condemn thee.” In Tom’s depiction, adultery becomes “our inherent condition,” while the adulterer becomes a version of Norman Mailer’s White Negro. Comparing marriage to adultery, Tom says, “To the one we bring token reverence, and wooden vows; to the other a vivid reverence bred upon the carnal presence of the forbidden, and vows that rend our hearts as we stammer them.” On day thirteen Tom considers the miracles of Christ, especially the question of why man was given those miracles recounted in the Bible but no others. Why not repeal all suffering? Tom’s is the answer of faith: “Alleviation is not the purpose of His miracles, but demonstration. Their randomness is not their defect, but their essence. . . .”—or put another way, “He came not to revoke the Law and Ground of our condition but to demonstrate a Law and Ground beyond.”

The other characters appear only in Tom’s rendition of them. Jane has been Tom’s “good stately girl” ever since they were both virgins. Unlike Tom, she is a political liberal with a “preposterous view of the church as an adjunct of religious studies and social service.” She does not, then, burn with Tom’s radical Paulinism. In contrast, Alicia acts much more instinctively than Jane and goes straight for what she wants— in this case, Tom. Their mutual passion is matched by their mutual capacity for jealousy and vindictiveness: He dismisses her as organist, and she squeals on him and Frankie Harlow. Neither of them is soppy with the “milky human kindness” that Tom sneers at in Jane and Ned Bork. To Tom, Ned is an impractical victim of the age of “flower people.” Tom taunts Ned about one of the latter’s sermons, asking him if he really believes “that an oligarchy of blacks and chicanos and college dropouts would come up with a better system, quote unquote, than the corporation board of Exxon.” The passage fairly defines their opposed temperaments.

Critical Context

Speaking of the bourgeois novel, which he describes as “inherently erotic,” Updike writes in an essay, “If domestic stability and personal salvation are at issue, acts of sexual conquest and surrender are important.” The remark seems especially apropos of A Month of Sundays, the two foci of which are domestic stability and personal salvation, and it illuminates other Updike works as a group: Rabbit, Run (1960), Couples (1968), Marry Me (1976), and The Witches of Eastwick (1984).

Updike’s oblique presentation of the moral issues dramatized in his marriage novels—and his Barthian separation of the ethical (man’s relations with man) and the religious (man’s relations with God)—confuses many critics. Updike stands where his protagonists stand, facing a set of Hobson’s choices. It is a position in which readers of modern fiction often find themselves.

Bibliography

McTavish, J. “John Updike and the Funny Theologian.” Theology Today 48 (January, 1992): 413-425. McTavish examines the influences and connections that European theologian Karl Barth had on Updike’s work. He explores the religious crisis that Updike experienced in his early life, Updike’s love for Barth as reflected in the characters in A Month of Sundays, and Barth’s views concerning the responsibilities of men toward women.

Schiff, James A. John Updike Revisited. New York: Twayne, 1998. Schiff endeavors to understand Updike’s entire body of work, putting individual works in context for the reader. Schiff provides commentary on works that have largely been ignored by the public, as well as books that have received little critical attention.

Schiff, James A. “Updike’s Scarlet Letter Trilogy: Recasting an American Myth.” Studies in American Fiction 20 (Spring, 1992): 17-31. Schiff explores Updike’s portrayal of renewal as an American quest that can be achieved through the joining of body and soul, as well as Updike’s disputation of Hawthorne’s Puritan ethic.

Schiff, James A. Updike’s Version: Rewriting the Scarlet Letter. Columbia: University of Missouri Press, 1992. Schiff provides an in-depth analysis of Updike’s Scarlet Letter trilogy, including A Month of Sundays. Schiff explores the themes of adultery and divided selves as reflected in Hawthorne’s classic and shows how Updike satirizes and expands the focus of Hawthorne’s novel.

Updike, John, and James Plath, ed. Conversations with John Updike. Jackson: University Press of Mississippi, 1994. A collection of interviews given by Updike between 1959 and 1993. A revealing portrait of Updike’s background and personality; his views on life, sex, politics, and religion; and his evolution as a writer.