Word: scarlet
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...Roger's Version (1986), John Updike constructed a plot with some teasing but unacknowledged similarities to Nathaniel Hawthorne's The Scarlet Letter: an unfrocked New England minister named Roger broods over the infidelity of his wife. This time out, the author makes his indebtedness perfectly clear. S., Updike's 32nd book and 13th novel, opens with two quotations from The Scarlet Letter and with a heroine who is an unmistakable incarnation of Hester Prynne, the most famous adulteress in American literature. Sarah Worth (nee Price) boasts a Prynne among her ancestors and, like Hester, a daughter named Pearl. This mother...
...other Hawthorne novels (Blithedale, Pyncheon) crop up in unexpected contexts; as Sarah seeks her karma in the Sunbelt, she has reason to resent "my old-fashioned Puritan conscience." But Updike's use of such references should not be taken too somberly; the stern, rock-ribbed moral universe of The Scarlet Letter serves here as a subtle counterpoint to a comic vision of anything-goes ethics in mid-1980s America...
...replace it. Thus does the life cycle on the White House grounds go on even as in the political world. The Benjamin Harrison Quercus coccinea dropped a limb over the fence onto Pennsylvania Avenue the other night. Nobody was underneath, thank goodness. But be wary. A 100-year-old scarlet oak has some privileges when it suddenly wearies. Nonetheless, the trunk of that tree is still sturdy, and it will be around in one form or another many more years...
...Scarlet Letter, Hester Prynne wears a crimson A as punishment for adultery. In Portland, Ore., Richard Bateman may wear a similar badge of shame when released from jail in two months. At his sentencing in May, Judge Dorothy M. Baker knew that he was unlikely to spend a long time behind bars in the overcrowded prison system, despite his history of molesting young children. So she ordered that for four years after his release, Bateman, 47, must post signs on his home and on both sides of any vehicle he drives that read, in letters at least three inches high...
There was ground fog the morning they carried the body up the mountain, following a bagpiper in Erskine tartan and Tibetans blowing horns as long as young pines and scarlet-berobed monks, to a meadow quilted with dandelions and buttercups and 3,000 or so of the American middle class, their babies in Kreeger & Son slings on their backs. Behind the corpse, which was borne in a wood-frame box wrapped in silk, came visiting lamas, borne in big cars, or lamasines, as one wag had it. "Our understanding," one after another in the crowd said, and happily...