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S Hardcover – February 12, 1988

by John Updike (Author)
3.9 3.9 out of 5 stars 96 ratings
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S. is the story of Sarah P. Worth, a thoroughly modern spiritual seeker who has become enamored of a Hindu mystic called the Arhat. A native New Englander, she goes west to join his ashram in Arizona, and there struggles alongside fellow sannyasins (pilgrims) in the difficult attempt to subdue ego and achieve moksha (salvation, release from illusion). “S.” details her adventures in letters and tapes dispatched to her husband, her daughter, her brother, her dentist, her hairdresser, and her psychiatrist—messages cleverly designed to keep her old world in order while she is creating for herself a new one. This is Hester Prynne’s side of the triangle described by Hawthorne’s Scarlet Letter; it is also a burlesque of the quest for enlightenment, and an affectionate meditation on American womanhood.


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  1. Print length
    288 pages
  2. Language
    English
  3. Publisher
    Alfred A. Knopf
  4. Publication date
    February 12, 1988
  5. Dimensions
    5.75 x 1.25 x 8.25 inches
  6. ISBN-10
    0394568354
  7. ISBN-13
    978-0394568355
  8. See all details
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Editorial Reviews

From Publishers Weekly

The eponymous S. is Sarah Worth, Boston bred, upper-class WASP, and when we meet her in this epistolary narrative, she is on an airplane, writing to tell her doctor husband she is leaving him to join her guru on an Arizona religious commune. In a whimsical twist, Updike makes Sarah a Hawthornian counterpart to Roger in Roger's Version: one of her ancestors was a Prynne; her daughter's name is Pearl. Through letters to members of her family, her hairdresser and dentist, and through tapes sent to her best friend Midge, Sarah relates the circumstances that prompted her to leave domineering, philandering Charles and to seek communion with the Arhat and his band of sannyasins (pilgrims) on the ashram. Willfully blind to the totalitarian methods of the Arhat's flunkies, Sarah reports her spiritual rebirth at the same time she records abysmal living conditions and brutal physical and financial exploitation. She mimes the Arhat's preachy nonsense that frees her ego for "nothingness" and her body for love affairs both heterosexual and lesbian. Eventually she is "chosen" by the Arhat himself; bitter disillusionment follows. Like all of Updike's work, the narrative is a commentary on our culture. Sometimes bordering on farce, it is often wickedly funny, especially when Sarah employs her sharp tongue to lecture her mother and daughter or write mendacious letters to the desperate people the Arhat has cheated. Updike is in his most playful mode here; and if Sarah is too much of a ninny to elicit the reader's sympathy, she is a wonderful embodiment of self-delusion and feminism run amok. 100,000 first printing; BOMC main selection.
Copyright 1988 Reed Business Information, Inc.

From Library Journal

Described as Updike's retelling of The Scarlet Letter from Hester's point of view, S . follows middle-aged doctor's wife Sarah Worth as she leaves her stifling security for life on a desert commune with a Bhagwan-like religious leader named Arhat. Through letters back home, Sarah tells of her growing importance in the commune and her growing self-consciousness. As the commune's internal order begins to break down under pressure from local officials and federal immigration authorities, Sarah becomes more intimate with Arhat, struggling to reconcile old values with new realities. While a far shot from Hawthorne, Sarah's story is sprightly, full of humor, and well told. This follow-up to Roger's Version ( LJ 9/1/86), also based on The Scarlet Letter, is recommended for most fiction collections. Ann H. Fisher, Radford P.L., Va.
Copyright 1988 Reed Business Information, Inc.

Product details

  • Publisher ‏ : ‎ Alfred A. Knopf; First Edition (February 12, 1988)
  • Language ‏ : ‎ English
  • Hardcover ‏ : ‎ 288 pages
  • ISBN-10 ‏ : ‎ 0394568354
  • ISBN-13 ‏ : ‎ 978-0394568355
  • Item Weight ‏ : ‎ 1.05 pounds
  • Dimensions ‏ : ‎ 5.75 x 1.25 x 8.25 inches
  • Customer Reviews:
    3.9 3.9 out of 5 stars 96 ratings

About the author

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John Updike

John Updike

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John Updike was born in 1932, in Shillington, Pennsylvania. He graduated from Harvard College in 1954, and spent a year in Oxford, England, at the Ruskin School of Drawing and Fine Art. From 1955 to 1957 he was a member of the staff of The New Yorker, and since 1957 lived in Massachusetts. He was the father of four children and the author of more than fifty books, including collections of short stories, poems, essays, and criticism. His novels won the Pulitzer Prize (twice), the National Book Award, the National Book Critics Circle Award, the Rosenthal Award, and the Howells Medal. A previous collection of essays, Hugging the Shore, received the 1983 National Book Critics Circle Award for criticism. John Updike died on January 27, 2009, at the age of 76.

Customer reviews

3.9 out of 5 stars
3.9 out of 5
96 global ratings
70 poems 1972 Penguin paperback my companion for 50 years
5 Stars
70 poems 1972 Penguin paperback my companion for 50 years
Many of these poems became a companion narrative to my own experiences in life; I know some by heart. The cover has fallen off. 2 postcards typed by Mr. Updike are saved inside what is left of my dogeared copy. His poetry both amuses and inspires me. I hate his novels. I have no idea what these other reviews refer to! Apparently not his poetry. I often regret that his work as a poet is not more widely understood and appreciated. Even the author himself left out one of my favourite comic poems from the approved later 'collection'. ('Recitative for sorely tested products'). Never let anyone tell you which are ''the best'' of an authors poems, let your instinct tell you ''this is genuine''; let the poems resonate with you personally, not some critic.
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Top reviews from the United States

ThatCrazyBookGuy
5.0 out of 5 stars One of Updikes Best!
Reviewed in the United States on September 7, 2023
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Love this book! I have read it three or four times. Funny as anything! Political humor and personal along with characters (well S) that I just love to read about. Love how she starts out and we watch her grow. She makes decisions, some bad some good. Just like a real person. Updike is a master. Somewhat different from his other books but this one is probably my favorite. Greatly recommended!
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Kathryn M.
4.0 out of 5 stars Great introduction to John Updike; more generally, a great analysis of the impact on life of our self-perceptions
Reviewed in the United States on November 10, 2012
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I'm so glad I finally read John Updike, starting with this book. It's a very touching, personal, well written diary, really. Updike is very open about having been self-conscious his whole life due to a skin condition he had that isolated him quite frequently as he tried to fight it by lying in the sun. The book is a revelation about the famous writer and how his life revolved around this condition and the self-consciousness it engendered. Being very self-conscious myself about certain things, I almost cried reading his revelations and honest self-assessments. I highly recommend this book if you want to understand the workings of self-consciousness or of the famous author.
7 people found this helpful
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E. James Morrissey Jr.
3.0 out of 5 stars Seeing life stages through John Updike
Reviewed in the United States on June 17, 2009
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Self-Consciousness
This book of John Updike's memoirs is a revealing view of how he viewed his life as he passed through various stages. The overly detailed descriptions of specific streets and houses led me to boredom frequently and seemed to have way too much space for the stories needs. His introverted image of himself is inconsistent with how his peers viewed him. The class rapscallion is missing of Shillington High School 1950 is missing.
Memorable book that follows the personal life of this great author through many stages of his life.
4 people found this helpful
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John
5.0 out of 5 stars From one Shillingtonian to another...
Reviewed in the United States on June 1, 1998
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One of the main regrets of my five years in Shillington (ages 12-16) was that I did not realize that I was walking in the footsteps of one of the greatest authors of all time. John Updike's autobiography, especially as it concerns Shillington, was like reading a bit of my own life. He was an alter boy at the church that is behind my old Miller Street home. I was a busboy at the restaurant that used to be his doctor's office that used to be a house. He used to walk up New Holland Avenue to the cemetary, passing number 39, which would years later be a home (apartment) to me. The hallowed halls of Governor Mifflin Jr. High, where I labored from 7th to 9th grade, were once the halls of the old high school that Mr. Updike once passed through. I wonder if we shared the same locker? The old movie theater, in which I saw my first movie alone, still holds a special place in my history. But through my many walks up and down Philadelphia Avenue, I am saddened by the fact that I was never drawn to number 117. My visits to Shillington in the past decade have been unfortunately too brief, and even before reading Mr. Updike's autobiography I have wanted to return to retrace my old footsteps. However, the walk up and down Philadelphia Avenue will include a stop, a reverential pause, at number 117, the shadow of my life in Shillington.
11 people found this helpful
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S. Belson
4.0 out of 5 stars This is Updike's biography.
Reviewed in the United States on August 2, 2009
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This is a heartbreaking memoir from a man who had the power and the will to share it.
One person found this helpful
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Elizabeth
3.0 out of 5 stars Notes from an Ashram
Reviewed in the United States on February 17, 2014
This book is written in one-sided correspondence from Sara, a New England raised WASP, who has decided to ditch her unsatisfying husband and boring life to live on an ashram in Arizona. I really liked that while the author recognized some of the silliness of this plan, he did not, as so many books that feature people living in communes or religious communities do, make this into a tragedy. There is no power crazed leader here who is seeking to dominate the world. Instead, Sara takes what she needs from this experience and moves on. And, having been astute enough to realize that it may not be a great idea to give all your money to an ashram, gets out with funds to set herself up in an island paradise.
The fact that this book is all in correspondence, to Sara's friends, husband, dentist and daughter, among other people, allows the inner workings of Sara's mind to explored in a way that was really interesting. I enjoyed the many observations that Sara makes about the particular experience of being a woman of her class and generation. I think the most heart-braking example of this is a letter she writes to a boyfriend she had before marrying, whom her parents made her break up with because he was Jewish. She writes to him of the sense of the belonging she had with him and the lack of fulfillment that her marriage brought her in contrast.
I would recommend this book to anyone who is interested in Eastern religions as well as anyone who is interested in novels about the inner workings of women's minds.
3 people found this helpful
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Kit Marlowe
5.0 out of 5 stars I thought I might die laughing
Reviewed in the United States on January 10, 2013
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or have my dear wife find me crumpled in front of the fireplace, a mere cinder, all that was left of my hilarity. This book is very, very funny. Although it is clear that Updike never had the chance to give it one more rewriting (there's stuff left that's like scaffolding), he creates one of the most amusing narrator-protagonists in modern literature. She is funny when she wants to be and funny, too, when she doesn't realize that she is.

Updike wrote a lot of novels, but I have my favorites:Rabbit at Rest and Villages. He was a master, under-appreciated, I think, because he didn't choose to take popular political stands. This late novel is one more proof of his unrivaled versatility. Get past the rough going at the beginning, and this book will make you glad.
6 people found this helpful
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Top reviews from other countries

Akanksha
3.0 out of 5 stars Interesting but a tiresome read.
Reviewed in India on December 10, 2021
Verified Purchase
Many have complained the same issue with the book. It is tiresome. Unnecessary stuff is dragged on for many pages and you lose the interest. I am almost finished with the book and I have no concerns for Sarah whatsoever.

I received the book damaged (as always), the book was crumpled down and already all around the pages I can see the aging.
Amazon seriously needs to pay some attention how they store and handle books. I have almost never received a book in "pristine" condition.
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J. Morgan
5.0 out of 5 stars Genius.
Reviewed in the United Kingdom on February 23, 2014
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This man is a genius. I am slowly working my way through all his books. I've read all the Rabbit ones - if you've not read those I'd start there. Enjoy.
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Mr.J.Bleakley.
3.0 out of 5 stars Overlong
Reviewed in the United Kingdom on August 20, 2018
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I struggled with this. About half way through, too many details regarding the day to day running of - what was at the time a popular form of, guru driven, religious retreat - did it for me! It was simply overburdened with extraneous detail. I read it in 2018.Maybe reading the book at the time it was current - published in the 80s +and purvaded by a tail end of the 60s feel - would be what's necessary to complete the work. A plus is John Updikes poetic prose. Also top - with an excellent glossary of terms - in depth analysis of the particular Indian esoteric path featured.
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Mr.J.Bleakley.
3.0 out of 5 stars Overlong
Reviewed in the United Kingdom on August 20, 2018
I struggled with this. About half way through, too many details regarding the day to day running of - what was at the time a popular form of, guru driven, religious retreat - did it for me! It was simply overburdened with extraneous detail. I read it in 2018.Maybe reading the book at the time it was current - published in the 80s +and purvaded by a tail end of the 60s feel - would be what's necessary to complete the work. A plus is John Updikes poetic prose. Also top - with an excellent glossary of terms - in depth analysis of the particular Indian esoteric path featured.
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Annie
5.0 out of 5 stars john is gone and i never met him
Reviewed in the United Kingdom on March 17, 2012
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nice little book - not what i was expecting from john updike really, but then it is his memoir not mine ! i love his books - this gives an insight into the man who wrote those BOOKS
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