Updike's Version: Rewriting the Scarlet Letter (Volume 1)

Although many readers are aware of John Updike's Rabbit tetralogy, fewer have paid close attention to his other multivolume work, "The Scarlet Letter trilogy."  In Updike'sVersion, James Schiff provides the first full-length critical analysis of Updike's trilogy since the publication of its final volume in 1988.  He demonstrates how Hawthorne's classic novel of adulterous love and divided selves has become an American myth, and how Updike, in his trilogy, has sought to expand, update, and satirize that myth.  The three volumes that make up the trilogy, A Month of Sundays (1975), Roger's Version (1986), and S. (1988), engage in a dialogue with Hawthorne's novel, commenting upon and altering the original story.  To understand the nature of this dialogue, Schiff employs a methodolgy specifically suited to Updike's mythical method, in which special attention is given to reader expectation, parody, point of view, and principles of fragmentation and condensation.

Updike's Version covers new ground in Updike's studies, revealing how the intertextual dialogue between Updike and Hawthorne is far more complex and extensive than has yet been acknowledged.  Providing close and detailed readings of the novels, Updike's Version will be of major importance to students and scholars of John Updike, Nathaniel Hawthorne's canonical American text, and American literature in general.

James A. Schiff teaches English at the University of Cincinnati in Ohio.