Tee Time : GOLF DREAMS.<i> By John Updike (Alfred A. Knopf: $23, 224 pp.)</i>

Golf is a silly game, even a sinister one. I know this. It gobbles land and water. We can’t quite forget that the paunchy, middle-aged men who play it--a stereotype, but still largely true--are an elite, no matter how comical they may look in pastel pants and logoed visors, climbing stiffly down from their electric carts to flail with their $500 titanium drivers in grotesque parody of the form the pros demonstrate on TV. I know, I know. Yet I love golf and have played it all my life.

John Updike, who has loved and played golf at least as long as I have--attaining a “modest 18 handicap” and wondering whether “the fine edge that other penmen had dulled with whiskey and doses of Hollywood I had let rust into dullness while woolgathering over pronation and weight shift, wrist-cock and knee-bend”--confesses to a similar ambivalence in this collection of his writings on the game.

In a poem, “Golfers” (1975), Updike writes:

We dread them, their brown arms and rasp of money,

their slacks the color of ice cream, their shoes,

whiter than bones, that stipple the downtrodden green

and take an open stance on the backs of the poor

But it’s characteristic of Updike that the sins he sees clearly with one eye he forgives with a wink of the other. He’s a kind-hearted person and a novelist, after all, not the Christian theologian he sometimes dabbles at being. A novelist’s task is to express life, not to deplore its messiness and variety. Like illicit sex--that other, greater Updike preoccupation--golf is a natural, human failing that offers us glimpses of transcendence.

The 31 pieces in this book range from light essays written for golf magazines (“Many men are more faithful to their golf partners than to their wives,” Updike notes in 1986, “and have stuck with them longer”) to excerpts from some of his major works. Harold (Rabbit) Angstrom, philanderer, duffer and Everyman extraordinaire, figures in several of the latter.

Updike fans will remember how in “Rabbit, Run” (1959), during a nightmarish round with a minister to whom he is unable to explain the impulse that has made him leave his wife, Rabbit finally hits a pure shot and cries, “That’s it!” But even the die-hard golfers among us may not have noticed that the doctors who perform heart surgery on him in “Rabbit at Rest” (1989) are modeled on famous pros: Greg Norman, Tom Kite, Raymond Floyd. “The old Pennsylvania jock . . . goes out among champions.”

In “A Month of Sundays” (1974), the Rev. Tom Marshfield, disciplined by his church for seducing women in his congregation, is permitted a good round in the company of other disgraced clerics, including a pederast and an arsonist. In Updike’s short story “The Pro” (1966), the pro, “a big gloomy sun-browned man,” has the aura of a psychiatrist but later, in his reciprocal need for the worshipful pupil-narrator--”Golf is life, and life is lessons”--is more like God.

Godlike, too, is the Scottish bag-toter in “Farrell’s Caddie” (1991), whose swing tips and psychic powers give the protagonist hope despite the stark truth of the story’s opening--that Farrell and every other member of his vacationing group of paunchy, middle-aged Long Island bankers is a “warty pickle blanching in the brine of time . . . resigned . . . to a golfing mediocrity that would poke its way down the sloping dogleg of decrepitude to the level green of death.”

The wages of golf is death. Updike couldn’t be clearer. In the poem quoted above, he concludes:

Emerging from the shower

shrunken, they are men,

mere men, old boys, lost, the last hole a horror.

Yet what kind of sin is this that has gods shouldering our clubs and smoothing out our putting strokes, that offers us--in the United States, at least--homely, inexpensive public courses and, in “Farrell’s Caddie,” “a rapid alternation of brisk showers and silvery sunshine, with rainbows springing up around them and tiny white daisies gleaming underfoot”?

In his New Yorker review of Michael Murphy’s “Golf in the Kingdom” (1972), Updike is obliged to complain that Murphy ducks the Christian problem of evil, that New Age “wisdoms imported from the Orient have a disturbing way of melting into physical therapy . . . and trivial spookiness.” In later years, however, he calls Murphy’s book “lovely” and “an authentic golf gem.” Like Updike’s own writing--like golf itself--it’s just too much fun.

In the unexpectedly morose preface to “Golf Dreams,” Updike claims to have changed his mind. “From my golf dreams I at last awake,” he announces after a season of poor play that he blames, reluctantly, on old age. “Beneath the comedy of complaints” in his previous golf writing, he says, “there ran always a bubbling undercurrent of hope.” Even Rabbit Angstrom, in death’s locker room (a condo complex in Florida called Valhalla Village), feels that “when you stand up on the first tee it is there, it comes back from wherever it lives during the rest of your life . . . the possibility of . . . a round without a speck of bad in it.” No more, Updike says.

Don’t listen. He may mean it, for the moment at least, but he doesn’t believe it any more than you or I do, any more than the Rev. Marshfield can believe that “the world will go on spinning without me . . . any woman will be happy without me . . . I am not really 15 billion light-years in diameter and shaped like a saddle, etc.” The writing, still bubbly and quizzical and luminous, gives him away. Golf is life--never mind how life ends. We know that already. We know. Which is why Updike, if he ever shows up at the Long Beach munis where I play, can join my foursome any time.