There is something irreligious in all this emphasis on Marshfield as author, and something dangerously athilistic. Marshfield takes his creator image too seriously for a humble servant of God--his apostasy is in his arrogance, more than his adultery. But Marshfield is sincerely religious, and this novel lives on the tension between his doubt and his belief, between his fear of "the universal nullity" and

a plain suspicion that someone in the immediate vicinity immensely, discreetly cares. God.

EVERY SUNDAY (there are no calendars, but he manages to keep track) Marshfield writes a sermon.

The first one is a paean to adultery, and a clever rationalization of the violability of the seventh commandment. It's not much else, but the sermons are supposed to get better as the month goes on. The second begins with an examination of some New Testament miracles and unfolds into an elegant defense of evil as "essential to a Creation of differentiated particulars." But again, he ends with apostasy, cursing his "docile suburban flock".

We are demand, I cure you, than, as our Lord cursed the fig treat may you depart from this place forever sterile may your generation either at the roots, and a better be fed by its rot.

Amen.

But in the end he is able to bless his congregation, in a sermon on a text from Corinthians, "we are of all men most miserable." It is a triumph of faith, in a godless time, from the unlikeliest of believers.

Those of us who live in the irrational may moderate our shame. Who has set us here, in this vocation, at this late date, out of due time? To all the question is to imply an answer there: is a qui, a Who, who has set; we have not accidently fallen, we have been placed. As of course we already know in our marrow.

What keeps this book from being more than an interesting and sometimes affecting experiment is Updike's unwillingness to cut himself off from the conventions of realism. The half-hearted word games, the tired ecclesiastical jokes, the shallow plot, are all consistent with a vision of Marshfield as a frustrated author given his big chance, but they are unnecessary. Marshfield's anomalous faith gives him a depth, and a dignity, that makes the rest extraneous and distracting. The mediocre sermon early in the month is realistically valid, but artistically wrong. As something written to a preacher in a desert motel, it is revealing and effective. But it is mediocre writing nonetheless, and that is not Marshfield's name on the dust jacket.