A MONTH OF SUNDAYS


Like an Updike housewife willing to have sex with the amorphous Protestant Pastor or unpleasant dentist

And willing to have her sex-acts described in purple prose

It's the permissive 70s; it's ok to covet thy neighbor's wife and bomb Vietnam

Guilt is good for the soul; therefore a certain quantity of sin needs first to be committed

The Pastor's wife is screwing the hippy Assistant-Pastor, who is against the war in Vietnam

(I'm a teenager reading this for its unsatisfactory Protestant pornography

A few years later I'll read an explanation of Updike's ugly theology in the New York Review of Books

And a memoir by Updike on why he thought the war was so noble)

The Pastor who narrates this novel is sent to a re-education camp for sex-offending ministers; really more like a spa

Where he can write up his sexual experiences in florid New Yorker prose

He'll be re-assigned to another congregation, I suppose

A bad air quality day; I can't catch my breath all evening

At five in the morning I still can't breathe so I start to compose this unpleasant memoir of reading Updike novels in the 1970s. . .