Word: marshfields
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...Marshfield's sermons (he writes one each Sunday of his stay) are slypastich es of biblical scholarship and sophistry...
After years of dutifully ministering to his flock, the Rev. Thomas Marshfield, 41, begins fleecing the ewes. When his trysts with the church organist and other assorted supplicants are exposed, Marshfield is shipped West for a month's rest to a desert spa for troubled clergymen. The regimen is ecumenical. There is golf in the afternoon, poker at night and daiquiris whenever. Mornings are spent alone at an obligatory typewriter, where orgies of therapeutic confession are the order...
...story reveals, Marshfield is a stock character from Updike's central casting. He snorts at liberal Protestantism and pumps for devotion inspired by awe and terror ("Mop up spilt religion! Let us have it in its original stony jars or not at all!"). At the same time he pushes graphic, adulterous sex as suburbia's best anodyne; coupling is sweetest with the ashen taste of sin. He sees women chiefly as attractive hurdles in the heavenly sweepstakes, where all the runners are male...
...perk up this familiar rehash, Updike gives his clergyman a bag of Nabokovian wordplays and tries to pass him off as Humbert Humbert (in Lolita, Humbert observed, "You can always count on a murderer for a fancy prose style"). Marshfield rattles off alliterations as if he were on death row. He describes a local nursery "which piously kept its Puerto Rican peony-pluckers in a state of purposeful peonage." With nary a blush he writes of returning home to the "fusty forgiveness of my fanlighted foyer." His frequent dissections of sex and theology revolve around a central question: How many...
Before long, Marshfield's worst problem seems to be a case of terminal cuteness. Unlike Humbert, he is not facing a murder trial. He is passing through a clerical dude ranch, free to resume his pallid philandering as soon as he leaves...