In 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 too is a fallen woman, running away from Massachusetts and her physician-husband of some 20 years to join a charismatic Indian guru's ashram in the Arizona desert. After her plane lands in Los Angeles, she relays a message home to her best friend Midge: "I stayed in this motel near the airport in a dreary area called Hawthorne."
Those with a taste for literary allusions will find more to savor here. Names lifted from 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.
The story of Sarah's pilgrimage unfolds through the missives she sends from the ashram: to her husband, daughter, mother, friend, psychiatrist, hairdresser and assorted others. With her nearest and dearest, Sarah fends off recriminations by going on the offense. She hectors her husband about his affairs with his nurses and the upkeep of their house and gardens. She tells Pearl, a Yale undergraduate who is spending a year abroad at Oxford, to avoid English homosexuals and "to concentrate on nice normal boys if you can find any in that dear decadent old country." She accuses her widowed mother living in Florida of financial imprudence and of ruining her skin in the sun: "I was shocked to see how brown you were. You looked dyed, frankly, and with your tinted hair the effect was honestly bizarre."