Updike's Version: New Tryst on an Old Theme
John Updike is once again on familiar turf, mixing high theology and low scatology in Roger's Version. This book is not so much an emotional implementation as it is an intellectual gambit, with the provability of the Almighty serving as its leitmotif. While trying to verify the existence of the Judeo-Christian God is certainly no new sport, Updike chooses to play by slightly uncommon rules than those which bound the likes of St. Augustine, Aquinas, Leibniz, Hume, Kant, and a slew of lesser known Christian philosophers. Instead, he hurls his belligerent and theological thunderbolts against the backdrop of present scientific plotting and mode - evoking evolution, the Big Bang, and the double bugaboo of today's supercomputers. Planck and Heisenberg butt heads with Kierkegaard and Karl Barth, ensuing in an thrilling payment that permeates Updike's permanently literate and frequently erudite pages.
The Roger of the title is Roger Lambert, a professor of religion at a Northeastern institution (probably, but not necessarily, Harvard Divinity School). Into his office walks Dale Kohler, a computer hacker and university research supporter who had petitioned for an appointment on the strength of his friendship with Roger's niece, Verna. Dale, hungry for a research grant, proceeds to harangue Roger on the possibilities of using knowledge - specifically, computer knowledge - to finally verify the existence of a Supreme Being, declaring: "The most miraculous thing is happening. The physicists are being paid down to the nitty-gritty, they've really just about pared things down to the essential details, and the last thing they ever probable to take house is happening. God is showing through. They despise it, but they can't do anything about it. Facts are facts. And I don't reckon public in the religion business, so to speak, are really attentive of this - aware, that is, that their case, far-out as it's permanently seemed, at last is being proven."
A specialist in early Christian heresies, Roger plays the cool, level-headed devil's advocate to Dale's bubbly deep enthusiasm. Where Dale yearns to quantify God through present empiricism and computer simulations, Roger prefers to keep Him "wholly other." The belligerent exchanges linking the two place forward some of the most engaging polemics to hit print in years.
But Roger's Version is not just an implementation in theological pomposity. This intellectual resentment is played out against a present re-telling of Nathaniel Hawthorne's Scarlet Letter. Roger is Roger Chillingworth, Dale is Arthur Dimmesdale, and Esther (Roger Lambert's second wife) is Hester Prynne. It is a tale Updike has been fascinated with for years. Where his earlier novel, A Month of Sundays, attempted to give Dimmesdale's viewpoint in Hawthorne's classic tale of adultery and revenge, Roger's Version takes Chillingworth's side. Hawthorne's villainous Roger becomes Updike's heroic Roger. Yet Roger Lambert is not without his villainous streaks. After Dale starts his total matter with Esther, Roger plots his revenge on them both: on Dale by not only tearing down his arguments but by destroying his belief as well; on Esther by embarking on an incestuous matter with his niece Verna.
It is through all of this rather lively philandering that Updike gets to expound on his second obsession: sex. "It's a grand surprise nature has cooked up for us," thinks Roger at one point, "love with its accelerated pulse rate and its reckless overestimation of the like object, its rhythmic build-up and discharge; but then that's it, there isn't another such treat life can offer, unless you count contract join and death."
Roger is first and chief a voyeur: "Secret glimpses...of life proceeding uninformed of my watching have permanently excited me." He regularly goes further than surprise glimpses, however, using his vivid thoughts to graphically detail Dale and Esther's clandestine trysts. Much of the novel, in fact, shows Roger identifying more and more with Dale, in anticipation of he starts looking at all around him - mainly his wife - through Dale's eyes. Roger finds this an infinitely fascinating and frightening experience, as the childish hacker reawakens ancient feelings and beliefs in him that he had long in view of the fact that abandoned for dead: "...I felt too warm, and started to sweat. I was trying too hard. I was dredging up beliefs I had once arrived at and long ago buried, to keep them safe." It is as much for this as for Dale's matter with Esther that Roger exacts his revenge.
In many respects, Roger's Version - while not Updike's best or most representative novel - is a book he has been working toward for years. The uneasy relationship linking religion and knowledge is a familiar hallmark of his work, and one can see the germ of this novel in what is possibly Updike's most well-known ephemeral story, "The Music School." In it, protagonist Alfred Schweigen relates that: "In the novel I by no means wrote, I sought after the hero to be a computer programmer in view of the fact that it was the most poetic and romantic occupation I could reckon of, and my hero had to be exceptionally romantic and delicate, for he was to die of adultery. Die, I mean, of knowing it was possible; the likelihood crushed him. I conceive of him...devising idioms whereby tribulations might be fed to the machines and emerge, below binomial percussion, as the composition of truth..."
While Roger's Version regularly seems poetic, it is far from romantic. There are no pure heroes, no resolution villains. Dale is too blunt and rowdy and trapped up in his own genius to incur much sympathy; Roger is too cold, too calculating, and too detached to inspire much emotion; the rest are merely players. "The Music School," of course, was written more than twenty being before Roger's Version, and Updike's rose-colored glasses have long in view of the fact that been painted by experience. While Roger's Version teases few creature emotions, it does succeed in being at once both fascinating and frustrating.
Those with modest patience for theological debate may find this all a bit much, but Updike has managed to produce another mature work for those willing to take on a challenge.
David Wisehart is the editor of The Wisehart Review - movies, books, and more! Visit http://www.wisehartreview.com/
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