S.

A novel. Flaptext:

The story of S'. concerns Sarah Worth, a latterday Hester Prynne who has become enamored of a Hindu religious leader called the Arhat. A New Englander, she goes west to join his commune in Arizona, and there mingles with the other sannyasins (pilgrims) in the difficult attempt to subdue ego and achieve moksha (salvation, release from illusion).

John Updike’s thirteenth novel takes the form of letters and tapes that his forty-two-year-old heroine dispatches to her husband, her mother, her daughter, her brother, her hairdresser, her psychiatrist, her dentist, and others as she strives to keep her old world in order while creating for herself a new one. This is Hester’s version of the triangle set forth in Hawthorne’s Scarlet Letter; it is also a medita­tion upon American womanhood, a romance, and a religious comedy.

Author's note:

Some details of this novel were suggested by reports on Rajneeshpuram in newspapers, Oregon Magazine, and Cities on a Hill, by Frances Fitzgerald; but all characters and milieux are fictional and not meant to resemble any actual persons or places. As to the religious context, much is owed to Mircea Eliade’s Yoga and A History of Religious Ideas, Joseph Campbell’s The Masks of God: Oriental Mythology, and Ajit Mookerjee’s Kundalini; the method of transliterating Sanskrit words in these works, however, has for this book’s purposes been replaced by a relatively imprecise style requiring no diacritical marks. A glossary of such words used in the text has been placed at the back.

The quotations from The Dhammapada are from the Penguin Classics edition, translated from the Pali by Juan Mascaro. I thank Toinette Lippe, Jean Le Mee, Alistair Shearer, Janet Surrey, Steve Bergman, and Martha Updike for guiding and correcting my steps in these occult paths.

author

John Updike

language

English

notes

This book is referenced by Peter Sloterdijk: "(...) wie John Updike es gemacht hat, der die Exkursion der Bhagwan-Bewegung nach Oregon als Hintergrund für ein geistreiches Buch mit dem Titel »S.« behandelt hat".

editions

S. A Novel by John Updike Year of publication : 1988 Publisher : Alfred A. Knopf, New York ISBN 9780-394-568355 (click ISBN to buy online) Number of pages : 278 Hardcover / Paperback / Ebook : H Edition notes : Copyright © by John Updike. First edition. Size : 209 x 140 x 30 mm This is a Borzoi book published by Alfred A. Knopf, Inc. A BOOK-OF-THE-MONTH CLUB DUAL MAIN SELECTION Jacket calligraphy hy John Stevens Jacket design by John Updike Hardcover. Flaps.