Distaff D00rmat

...Sometimes it seems that Updike's need to pour on more and more, regardless of relevance, drives him into carelessness...

...Next most unhappy would be true believers in one of the various Eastern cults whose language and rites are mingle-mangled at the ashram Sarah Worth describes in the tapes and letters that make up the book...

...Did Updike really think he would get away with it...

...Take her account of becoming expert at operating the ashram backhoe...

...they can't reach down far enough to reveal and root out feelings too deep for even an intelligent man's awareness...

...In apparent innocence the reviewers quote her boast that "some of the guys would let me scratch their backs with it as a joke...

...These would be, of course, Updike's female readers, if any still remain...

...I must leave it to your judgment, to what extent it is still true that a young woman compromises and cheapens herself by openly lending herself to the companionship of young men with all that that implies...

...Here, at once, the trouble begins...

...How dare he claim Hawthorne's passionate study of a strong woman among fallible men as ancestor to a novel that its own heroine might dismiss as a "fun story...

...And indeed," Updike noted in a New York Times interview, "the binding of the book is pink...

...in another you were my creator, you had put me here, in this rocky grassy sparkling seaside landscape...

...Updike has earned this respect, if only for his own criticism, thoughtful and searching, often inspired, and nearly always just...

...Your cheek so excitingly rough in bed at night, that of a beast in whom time had been ticking all day, and then so excitingly smooth in the morning when I kissed you goodbye so you could go heal the world...

...More tellingly, the symbolic import of some of Sarah's exploits seems to have been missed...

...Imagine their vexed search for some reason why Updike should take for his opening page the majestic picture of Hester Prynne emerging from prison...

...Podhoretz), this humor is blacker than all the portentous "darkness" in his novels...

...How many critics have pointed out the basic irony of the book...

...Watertown, Mother...

...Updike gives no grounds for fairness, so the secret can be told...

...Then, as they discover how frail is the connection, hear their indignant cry: What nerve...

...The large promise became direly suspect when Updike went on to cite The Witches of Eastwick as a sign of good intent...

...Yes, and he has, to an amazing degree...

...In accidentally taped scenes of sly, skillful and none too subtle pornography (whose implications in the '80s are fairly frightening), he passes his contamination, not to speak of hispindu (semen), on to Sarah...

...Other groups come to mind, but let us get on to the most injuriously treated...

...Each mile she flies is westward toward the guru whose picture has infatuated her during her yoga lessons...

...Why, to a man, of course...

...He is a heel, but as in a Bogart movie she still adores him...

...a feminine, hopeful fresh pink...

...A writer can hardly be expected to keep a character from expressing the author's ideas, even when he tries...

...Nevertheless, the critical reverence goes surprisingly far...

...With Updike's talent, couldn't he have contrived a better way...

...In her next letter (addressed to her daughter whom she would never have named Pearl but for the curious need of some link with The Scarlet Letter), Updike permits Sarah what he assumes is a typical discontent—a husband's unresponsiveness: "You remember how conscientiously I used to tell him, at dinnertime, of my day?—the little tailwagging housewife-puppy, whimpering and drooling, offering up her pathetic worried bones and chewing sticks, her shopping trips to Boston and her excursions to the plant nursery in Wenham, her tennis games and her yoga lessons and her boozy little lunches at the club...

...Sarah criesout after making this highly unlikely disclosure to the woman she most distrusts...

...After telling him how "shamelessly happy" she was with her "eternal date," she goes on to say she didn't mind "fatally" his political or professional politics, or what he did with the nurses after hours "when it became apparent...

...The wonderful worthy way you smelled...

...Yet Updike clearly does not try...

...always stuck where the men have put them...

...The Master is Art Steinmetz, half Jew, half Armenian, from Watertown, Massachusetts...

...No joke there, reader...

...When Sarah takes flight, where is she going...

...She tells Charles so: "I have left you out of love for another...

...But what happens after she finds him is Updike's warning to all women who wish to leave their husbands...

...Nobody, of course, should make the mistake of underrating Updike as storyteller...

...The bass voice sounds positively gleeful as it breaks in on the silly treble he has invented...

...And your sweat, distinctly your own...

...or else not invite the young lady to come on it...

...He begins S. at a moment that has hooked so many readers over the centuries, with the heroine in flight (this time literally) from one life to another...

...If that wasn't enough for the feminists, the contents would take care of "this reservation out in some quarters about my portrayals of women...

...No review of his latest novel, for instance, suggests the conflux of readers the book seems designed to offend...

...At this point who does the Arhat, the Deserving One, turn out to be...

...It's the whole story...

...It serves to remind us that intentions are conscious...

...Actually, she had earned the living to support him through medical school...

...According to its advance publicity, S. was meant to mollify feminists...

...Reviewed by Hope Hale Davis Author, "The Dark Way to the Plaza" Literary critics tend to treat John Updike the way porcupines are said to make love: carefully...

...It is understandable that critics have looked for abstruse reasons to justify in Updike what they might see in others as inexcusable...

...Again, having at the start reported in detail Sarah's tricky manipulations of a Wall Street portfolio to get rather more than her share of the couple's joint holdings as a going-away gift to herself, she seems to blank out all this financial acumen when she does the ashram's accounts...

...To make sure of sounding feminine Updike writes in a kind of falsetto, fluttery and adolescent, with page-long sentences going off on scatterbrained tangents...

...At the ashram, after months and pages of talk about the achievement of svampa (proper form) and vidya (wisdom), the Master himself is shown to be rather seriously contaminated with kama (sexual desire...

...Begin with the smallest group—those who have recently read The Scarlet Letter...

...Updike can no more conceal his snobbery here than he can hide his male superiority throughout the book...

...For instance, this 42-year-old mother, who graduated from college in the '60s and now admits to feeling younger than ever, sternly criticizes Pearl's plans for a trip to Amsterdam with a fellow student: "Inmy day, of course, a young man would either pay for such an excursion...

...Reporting to Midge, her supposedly best friend back east, Sarah "guesses" that they do their banking in the Bahamas because the country is so "tiny...

...Sarah's flashes of wit, passages of sophisticated eloquence and periods of serious thought, along with her usual airheaded chatter, are inconsistencies that make her not real and human, but simply impossible...

...as if to say to this big silent hedoctor, this gray eminence, 'See, I'm not wasting your money, I couldn't find a thing I wanted to buy at Bonwit's!'" Pretty clever, isn't it, having a woman ingenuously describe her own trivialities...

...Although congratulating herself on her escape, she weeps as she writes to tell her husband why she had to leave...

...It was a sincere attempt to write about a woman on the move, " Updike says in the Times interview, "and maybe will somewhat satisfy those women who feel that my women are...

...Because "though in some sense you were just another Boston-bred preppy brat...

...No one has focused on Updike's obvious, almost perverse failure to solve the primary problem of the epistolary novel...

...She herself, don't forget, is sleeping with a series of men at the ashram as she climbs upward to the guru...

...This is a crucial fault, one not to be found in Madame Bovary, Anna Karenina or— significantly—in The Scarlet Letter...

...In the midst of Sarah's reasons for leaving her doctor husband Updike also makes her blurt, "My old Charles— how much I loved you and love you still...

...She buries her face in his dirty pajamas, and loves the smells he leaves in the bathroom each morning...

...There, he said, he made " a very determined attempt to write about women who did have careers of a sort—they were professional witches.' Funnier than his intentional comedy in S. (he names Sarah's fictional dentist Dr...

...He has Sarah spending reams of paper and reels of tape to tell her correspondents what they know better than anyone, including the color of their own wallpaper—information that only the reader has lacked...

...Midge, in the end, betrays her confidence and snatches her husband, thus confirming Updike's expressed opinion of friendships between women...