Word: marshfield
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...annual income was clearly healthy though?enough to satisfy his addiction to flight and gadgetry with such items as a twin-engine Turbo Commander turboprop and a Beechcraft. He also keeps a helicopter, built by his own company (Enstrom Corp. of Michigan), on his 78½-acre spread in Marshfield, Mass., 30 miles south of Boston. His 17-room house there is equipped with indoor and outdoor swimming pools and nearly every form of 20th century electronic communication short of his own hot line to Moscow. The gray-carpeted lair in his office in Boston, which he rarely visits, is known...
...good, gods, nods, nous, gnus, anus, Amos. "Eight strokes with some cheating and a one putt." It is as if Updike has been suppressing all this game-playing for years as self-indulgent and inappropriate, and now he has discovered the perfect way out--he can pin it on Marshfield in the name of character development...
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...
EVERY SUNDAY (there are no calendars, but he manages to keep track) Marshfield writes a sermon...
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...