Book Review: The Roger Version by John Updike

Updike’s version: new quote on an old topic

John Updike is once again in familiar territory, mixing high theology and low eschatology in Roger’s Version. This book is not so much an emotional exercise as an intellectual tactic, with the demonstrability of the Almighty as its leitmotif. While trying to prove the existence of the Judeo-Christian God is certainly not a new sport, Updike chooses to play by slightly different rules than those that limit the likes of St. Augustine, Thomas Aquinas, Leibniz, Hume, Kant, and a host of lesser folks. known Christian philosophers. Instead, he casts his argumentative and theological beams against the backdrop of modern scientific thought and method, evoking evolution, the Big Bang, and the binary weirdo of today’s supercomputers. Planck and Heisenberg collide with Kierkegaard and Karl Barth, resulting in an electric charge that permeates Updike’s always literate and often erudite pages.

The Roger in the title is Roger Lambert, a professor of divinity at a Northeastern university (probably, but not necessarily, at Harvard Divinity School). Entering his office is Dale Kohler, a computer hacker and college research assistant who requested a date because of his friendship with Roger’s niece, Verna. Dale, hungry for a research grant, proceeds to harangue Roger about the possibilities of using science, specifically, computers, to finally prove the existence of a Supreme Being, declaring, “The most miraculous thing is happening. Physicists are They’re getting to work.” the nitty-gritty, they’ve really whittled things down to the last few details, and the last thing they expected to happen is happening. God is showing up. They hate it, but they can’t do anything about it. The facts are the facts. And I don’t think people in the religion business, so to speak, are really aware of this;

A specialist in early Christian heresies, Roger plays the cool, no-nonsense devil’s advocate to Dale’s bubbly religious enthusiasm. Where Dale longs to quantify God through modern empiricism and computer simulations, Roger prefers to keep it “totally other.” The combative exchanges between the two offer some of the most interesting polemics to come out in years.

But Roger’s version is not just an exercise in theological pomposity. This intellectual antagonism is played out against a modern version of Nathaniel Hawthorne’s The Scarlet Letter. Roger is Roger Chillingworth, Dale is Arthur Dimmesdale and Esther (Roger Lambert’s second wife) is Hester Prynne. It’s a story Updike has been fascinated with for years. Where his earlier novel, A Month of Sundays, attempted to give Dimmesdale’s point of view on Hawthorne’s classic tale of adultery and revenge, Roger’s Version takes Chillingworth’s side. The villainous Roger of Hawthorne becomes the heroic Roger of Updike. However, Roger Lambert is not without his villainous streaks. After Dale begins his long-term relationship with Esther, Roger plans revenge on both of them: on Dale by not only tearing down his arguments but also destroying his faith; in Esther embarking on an incestuous relationship with her niece Verna de ella.

It’s through all this rather energetic gibberish that Updike gets to expose his second obsession: sex. “It is a great surprise that nature has prepared for us,” Roger thinks at one point, “love with its racing pulse and its drastic overestimation of the love object, its accumulation and rhythmic discharge; but that’s all, there is no another delight that life can offer, unless you count the bridge of contract and death.”

Roger is, first and foremost, a voyeur: “Secret glimpses… of life that goes by without my noticing my observation have always excited me.” However, he often goes beyond the secret glimpses and uses his vivid imagination to graphically detail Dale and Esther’s clandestine dates. Much of the novel, in fact, shows Roger identifying more and more with Dale, until he begins to look at everything around him, especially his wife, through Dale’s eyes. Roger finds this an endlessly fascinating and terrifying experience, as the young hacker reawakens old feelings and beliefs in him that he had long since given up for dead: “…I was getting too hot and I started sweating. I was trying too hard. I was bringing up beliefs I once came to and buried long ago, to keep them safe.” It is as much for this as for Dale’s affair with Esther that Roger takes revenge.

In many respects, Roger’s Version, while not Updike’s best or most representative novel, is a book he has been working on for years. The uneasy relationship between religion and science is a familiar hallmark of his work, and one can see the germ of this novel in what is arguably Updike’s most famous short story, “The Music School.” In it, the protagonist Alfred Schweigen relates that: “In the novel I never wrote, I wanted the hero to be a computer programmer because it was the most poetic and romantic occupation I could think of, and my hero had to be extremely romantic and delicate.” . , because he was going to die of adultery. Dying, I mean, of knowing that it was possible; the possibility crushed him. I conceive of it… devising idioms by which problems could be fed to machines and emerge, under binomial percussion, as the music of truth…”

While Roger’s version often seems poetic, it is far from romantic. There are no pure heroes, no absolute villains. Dale is too outspoken and boisterous and caught up in his own temper to win much sympathy; Roger is too cold, too calculating, and too aloof to inspire much emotion; the rest are mere players. “The School of Music,” of course, was written more than twenty years before Roger’s Version, and Updike’s rose-tinted glasses have long since been tinted by experience. While Roger’s Version elicits few human emotions, it manages to be both fascinating and frustrating.

Those with little patience for theological debate may find all of this too much, but Updike has managed to produce another mature work for those willing to take on a challenge.