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Title: S. by John Updike, Judith B. Jones ISBN: 5-552-03460-0 Publisher: Alfred A. Knopf Pub. Date: March, 1988 Format: Hardcover Volumes: 1 List Price(USD): $17.95

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Average Customer Rating: 3.22 (9 reviews)

Rating: 5
Summary: Funniest Updike
Comment: Updike has this amazing ability to turn his hand to anything. There is no distinct Updike style you could ever parody. He just writes amazingly well. He can put himself inside the skin of anyone of of any ethnicity or sex. His tone rends to be satirical but he can be profound. This is one of his most undiluted attempts at out and out comedy.
It is written from the point of view of a very WASP New England lady (one of her ancestors is a Prynne, and her daughter is called Pearl) who deserts her adulterous doctor husband to join a Hindu or Buddhist (I was never quite sure which) commune in Arizona.It's written in the form of the letters and tapes she sends to correspodents back East (her dentist, hairdresser, husband, psychotherapist, daughter,best friend, lawyer, hairdresser's jailed son etc).
She starts off as a naive dupe, but by the end has oth cleverly outsmarted everyone who tried to rip her off and achieved the spiritual development she sought from the fraudulent guru.

Rating: 2
Summary: Failed experiments
Comment: I thought that "S" was a strange book - a novel in which Updike experiments with a different (for him) format. "S" is comprised of a series of letters, mostly from and to Sarah Worth ("S"), and the transcripts of taped conversations.

Sarah Worth leaves her husband to join an ashram in Arizona, ostensibly to to find a new meaning to her life (or a better way of living). However, Sarah's past life, habits, and ways of thought prove difficult to shake off. The members of the ashram do not live up to their billing. Things begin to deteriorate rapidly.

"S" is a deeply acerbic satire. Little escapes Updike's criticism: the ashram; those Americans and Europeans who form the ashram's membership; the leaders of the ashram; the forces of conservatism that oppose the ashram; and the middle-class American female as exemplified by Sarah Worth. But I felt that Updike was moving beyond satire or comedy into contempt - as if to say that he washed his hands of the whole self-indulgent and hypocritical lot.

Another difficulty I found with "S" was that it was very predictable. There's not much in the plot to surprise, not much that you feel you haven't seen or read somewhere before. But the main problem was Updike's apparent unease with this style of epistolatory writing. At best it creaks along, only to fall apart with Updike resorting to inserted "taped conversations". As a result, it felt very contrived.

Updike has written far better novels than this.

G Rodgers

Rating: 4
Summary: Updike on religious humor and the female condition
Comment: S. is the story of Sarah Worth, a New England matron who flees the confines of midcentury feminine affluence to seek spiritual (and sexual) enlightenment in a religious commune. She chronicles her adventure in letters to her best friend, daughter, and estranged husband, as well as short notes to her former dentist and hairdresser, tapes of conversations with the commune's leader, and a selection of the letters she writes on behalf of the commune's business office. The story unfolds briskly and subtely, with Updike employing his satirical skill to show a woman who, in leaving her life behind, manages to take it all with her.

A benefit of the letter format is that it allows a full exploration of the narrator's voice, to excellent effect. It also suppresses Updike's tendency to rely too heavily on his (excellent) descriptive language and instroduces an element of suspense that makes the story quite absorbing.

S. has been criticized by other reviewers for its perceived mockery of Eastern religions, but I don't think this is intended. Updike has obviously done extensive research - if not into Eastern religions themselves, then at least into their Western offshoots - and presents the characters with what, for him, is considerable sympathy. Of course he mocks the narrator's blind devotion to the commune - that's part of what the book is about - but he's mocking the misdirection of her efforts, not the ideals to which she aspires.

The one element of the book that frustrated me was Updike's treatment of his narrator. Sure, it's fun to read a book about an arrogant and slightly hysterical woman who is always just slightly out of her league - a Bridget Jones for our mothers' generation. But it would perhaps be more interesting to watch a character really grow through the course of the novel and transcend, or at least recognize, her own bias. Of course that kind of revelatory change would be anathema to Updike, whose thesis - popping up, appropriately, in book after book - seems to be that life is a cycle, endlessly revolving, lush with beauty and without escape. And this book is - first and foremost, like all his books - Updike.