[In the following review, Gilman provides a negative evaluation of S.]

John Updike's fiction has always suffered under the whips and scorns of outraged feminists. They charge him with an inability to portray, or even to imagine, women in other than clichéd, male-oriented ways, however high-flown their expression. He doesn't like women, they say, and is incapable of “getting inside” a female mind. I think the accusation is pretty much on the mark and from my file pluck a couple of many possible pieces of evidence. From a story called “The Lifeguard”: “Women are an alien race of pagans set down among us. Every seduction is a conversion.” From the novel A Month of Sundays: “Babies and guilt, women are made for lugging.”

Updike has said that he wrote his new novel in part as a refutation of the feminist take on him. If this is so, the sad irony is that S. is only likely to confirm it Indeed, it seems to me that Updike's fiction is, or has become, more problematic, more afflicted, than the most thoroughgoing consideration of gender bias can even touch on, let alone explain. Any broad estimation of Updike's position in the public and, to some extent, the critical mind would include these elements: he is a superb “natural” stylist; he is among the most erudite of our writers of fiction; and he is one of the very few who concern themselves seriously with religion. I want to take up each of these assertions, or dogmas, about Updike's fiction, in order to place S. in an intelligible context.

To begin with, there isn't any question that Updike is one of the most purely gifted of our major novelists. Yet his particular talent doesn't necessarily make him a fully satisfying, or an estimable, one. This is because sheer verbal power, that apparent force of nature, the cormorant-like ingestion of experience and its seemingly effortless conversion into “brilliant” language, isn't in itself sufficient for great fiction. It may even in some ways be inimical to it.

Years ago, in a review of The Centaur, I cited, as a cautionary note on Updike, Pascal's remark that “continual eloquence is wearying.” My point was that in his pursuit of, or delight in, vivid writing, his penchant for putting his coruscating literary genius on display, Updike keeps his prose in a constant fever, making no provisions for the periodic cessations of intensity, the quiet, sometimes matter-of-fact integument and ground that can alone sustain eloquence and keep it from satiety. In a related vein, Gilbert Sorrentino once described Updike's style as “twitching and quivering incessantly.” Sorrentino went on to say that Updike's writing, so often praised for its “poetry,” is in fact falsely poetic, a matter of verbal glitter with almost nothing beneath it and no invigorating coherence with actuality: “Its fancy images are not in touch with the world but emblazon it.”

I think this is too harsh or too sweeping an indictment, but some part of it is true. Updike isn't always cutting arabesques on the surface of the world. His perceptions of manners and morals within the suburban, white, affluent milieus he's chiefly probed are frequently shrewd and original, and his eye for the small, telling absurdities of our culture is usually keen. What's more, a denunciation like Sorrentino's ignores Updike's humor, a generally bitchy or even cruel humor, to be sure, but not easily resisted. Yet too often we do find him straining for effect, sacrificing sense for éclat, studding his prose with little jewels of expressiveness that feel, and alas mostly are, arbitrary, merely fanciful. (From The Centaur: “On a stiff tablecloth a loaf of sugary bread lay sequined in pointillist dabs of light.”)

As for his erudition, yes, I think Updike is among the most learned of our writers of fiction, but how deep does this learning go, and for what is it used? His mind is stuffed with materials, from classical languages and mythology to the latest scientific theories. He is a master, or at least an energetic practitioner, of allusion, reference, the esoteric (and therefore often snobbish) citation. Indeed he sometimes gives the impression of being a higher level, more “serious” James Michener, assiduously doing research on some subject or other before weaving a fiction around it. The Centaur and The Coup are in part novels of this kind.

This quasi-documentary or heavily researched aspect of his writing, which sometimes gives the effect of a smart brat parading his knowledge, has become increasingly pronounced in his last three novels: The Witches of Eastwick, with its arcane lore about sorcery; Roger's Version, heavily drawing on computer science and so-called “crisis” theology; and S … well, I'll come to its scholarly paraphernalia in a moment. All three books give off a feeling of unease, if not of desperation, a sense of straining for subject as well as style. It's as if Updike had begun to suspect the exhaustion of his predominantly realistic and familiar vein, the permutations of adultery and avarice in WASP precincts, and was trying to rebut the general charge—of which misogyny is a specific instance—that he has narrow preoccupations and constricted sympathy. Yet the preoccupations remain, the sympathy is still straitened; and nowhere does this lack of sympathy, and an accompanying lack of true engagement, show itself more depressingly than in his treatment of religion.

Perhaps I should speak of the place of religion in these and other Updike works. To put it plainly, I don't think Updike is in any sense a religious writer, or even that he has any serious interest in religious experience. The sociology of religion, yes, or more accurately, of certain areas of Protestantism: numerous churchgoers, and a battalion of ministers with their wives and paramours, inhabit his fiction, but they are engaged less in seeking or even inquiring after salvation than in occupying a place in society, a métier with minimal spiritual duties or demands. The title character of Roger's Version would seem to be speaking for his creator when he muses on the “barbaric religion of blood atonement” symbolized by the Cross.

A sticky business that, an unpleasant one. Better to concentrate on something less consequential, more “human”—say, the relations between nominal faith and the pressures, inconveniences really, of moral and especially sexual prohibitions. Insofar as it deals with religion at all, one can extract from Updike's fiction a continuing intricate rationale for illicit erotic pursuits within the confines of what Sarah Worth, the protagonist of S., calls an “atrophied, Puritan theocracy.” To be sure, not many of us are held by that particular dead hand. But we're all caught up in some moral code or other, and one source of Updike's thematic appeal, to male readers at any rate, is the suspension of such codes to allow the worm in the flesh to wriggle more freely.

The anti-sermon goes something like this: “We're God's creatures (if He exists), we're human, we're bored, we have sensual natures. How can He (if He exists) punish us for yielding now and then to their pulsations?” Any sense of sin, but more important any sense of the possible tension between agape and eros, faith and carnality, has been leached out. Guilt is an emotion foreign to Updike's characters—except for many of his women, who, he told us, are “built” for hauling it around.

It's in the light of Updike's recent strategy of trying to correct his image in feminist eyes that we have to look at S. Even more than The Witches of Eastwick, S. seems to celebrate the freedom of women to pursue their carnal and emotional ends, and to be relieved of guilt for doing so. And even though the ostensible “religion” in the book is tantric yoga, the enemy remains that old, weary, “atrophied,” discredited Protestantism. This it seems is what accounts for Updike's decision to rewrite, or to “up-date,” perhaps the greatest of all American fictions in which sex and religion confront one another, Hawthorne's The Scarlet Letter, with its archetypal female victim.

The direct exploitation of the earlier book is thin and halfhearted. “S” (for Sarah, maybe also for sex) replaces the old “A”; two quotes from The Scarlet Letter serve as epigraphs; Sarah's daughter is named Pearl and her mother's maiden name is Prynne; a Chillingsworth (and, from another Hawthorne novel, a Blithedale) figures superficially in the narrative. Yet the intention is clear throughout: to “revise” Hawthorne, to re-create him in a comic mode, to take the sting out of his tale by placing its protagonist in a modern setting where adultery is no longer anything to cause anguish, and so to exorcise the remaining ghosts of Puritanism.

At 44, Sarah Worth has skipped out on her cold, successful New England doctor husband after years of “respectable bondage and socially sanctioned frivolity,” as she tells him in one of the letters that make up this epistolary novel. She's gone to an ashram in Arizona ruled over by a guru, called “arhat” here, who preaches the primacy of sex over ego, and over everything else. The place is avowedly modeled after the Rajneeshpuram of late, lamented Oregon memory, and Updike has a good deal of sport mocking its more blatant silliness and fraudulence. What Sarah calls at first “our beautiful experiment in non-competitive living” turns out to be a ferocious battle among several women for the chief place in the arhat's bed, and he himself turns out to be one Art Steinmetz, a fake fakir from Watertown, Massachusetts.

When the satiric energy is there, S. can be very funny. The arhat answers a dunning letter about “6 unpaid Lincoln limos” by saying that he's referred it to “our chief accountant … who is unfortunately enjoying two weeks of uninterrupted meditation.” Sarah tells a friend that “I'm beyond … anger … or any emotion except love and acceptance,” and immediately follows this with “Charles [her husband] now just seems impossibly small, like one of those bugs you see crawling across a bathroom tile.” The arhat, in the process of seducing the willing Sarah, tells her that “Maithuna is not what is called in this coarse country ‘fucking.’ It is cosmic play.”

The entire Maithuna sequence between Sarah and the “guru obscuru” is a little masterpiece of parody and wicked humor. Updike's eye for the right trade names (Clairol, Fritos, No More Tears) and the pompous object (“fluted double-serpentine candleholders”) is as accurate as ever. And on the more sober side, there's a somewhat touching letter from Sarah to her college sweetheart, whom her proper WASP family forcibly dissuaded her from marrying because of his Jewishness and intellectuality, a surrender she says she now deeply regrets.

Yet the satire is inconsistent, and the moments of true feeling are rare. Updike doesn't seem able to decide if, despite the quackery, those mystics of carnality aren't on to a good thing. In any case, having immersed himself in Eastern erotic theology, he isn't about to let his investment lie idle. The book has a 13-page glossary of Sanskrit terms, many of them of a sexual nature, and the mind flags at having to juggle them and to retain their various meanings in the text: “Aropa attribution of qualities to the object, that is, subduing the beloved's physical, biological, and psychological aspects to an ontological perspective”; “Purnabhisheka ritual copulation practiced in ‘left-handed’ tantric yoga; the shri chakra or chakra puja.”

There's something half-serious and half-ludicrous about all this. Sarah only fitfully sees the absurd side, however, for she's too intent, as Updike's representative “new” woman, on pursuing her dream of rebirth. In the end Updike has his protagonist, whom the arhat has renamed “Kundalini,” the serpent of female energy dormant at the base of the spinal column,“ flee the ashram's collapse and relocate on a Caribbean island. There she contemplates the lessons she's learned and thinks, in “a serene and benign” mood (but with twinges of regret), about the break she's made from her stick of a husband and her wider past.

But one freedom she hasn't gained is from her bitchiness—to Charles, for example, on hearing of his impending remarriage, “You and your roly-poly little suburban pudding.” And more important, one freedom Updike hasn't won in writing S. is from his fixed sense of women, his inevitable creation of them as projections of male sensibility.

There are several wonderful unwitting specific examples of this. In a letter to her daughter, Sarah speaks of the girl's “wide-eyed long-haired easy-striding American beauty.” No mother would write like this, no woman would. But a man, and one, moreover, frozen in adolescent romantic desire, surely might. Again to her daughter: “How can we help but love those fathers, the way the sides of their necks smell of sweat and aftershave when they pick us up off the floor and give us that squeeze that knocks us breathless.” Well, it would be nice for us if it were so, but I suspect that my own daughters love me for rather different reasons.

What Hawthorne was able to do with Hester Prynne, as Updike isn't able to do with Sarah, was to extend his imagination to encompass her difference from him, and then to inculpate himself in her sorrowful fate. In wishing to make his modern Hester's destiny a lighthearted one, Updike takes no responsibility at all. Sarah isn't different from him, she's simply a man in novelistic drag. And S. isn't a liberation from the troubles of Updike's fiction, but their continuation. So many gifts, so much intelligence. To what end?