www.emergenthermit.comDivinity professor, Roger Lambert, seems to have a great deal of problems. Being hassled and annoyed by a young science-minded evangelical student named Dale about a grant for a project involving the proof of God’s existence is a minor inconvenience on the scale. It would seem that Dale is just as determined to find God behind every biological and cosmological corner as Roger’s wife, Esther, is determined to corrupt Dale’s already fragile faith with fornication. As the divinity board decides whether or not they want to give Dale the grant, his faith slowly diminishes as his grant-project, symbiotically linked to his faith, becomes more difficult. Thrown into the mix is the ‘trashy teenage girl’ for whom Roger longs, as the back of my edition phrases it. I suppose they thought this description of the girl was tantalizing enough and less likely to repel airport readers than the fact of the matter: The teenage girl is, in fact, Roger’s niece. As Roger’s incestuous longings are slowly teased into fruition, Dale’s longings assault us abruptly, having given us little build-up save an awkward Thanksgiving dinner at the Lambert home. The assault takes the form of Roger’s fist-person narration morphing into a personal but emotionally uninvested God’s-eye view of what takes place in the bedroom between Dale and Esther. The violence of this high style is first evident as the reader questions what the implications of this narrative choice might be. We’re given no answer, ultimately. It serves, at most, to give Roger’s narration a set of jealous wise-cracks. Sometimes he sadistically (yet reasonably) says something to make Dale self conscious about the adultery business, but that’s about all. Where, then, does the tension lie? Is it the considered abortion of his niece? Well, considering Roger is both in favor of it and not the father, not really. Is it Dale’s impending loss of faith? The potential breakup of the Lambert marriage? Very little comes of any of it. In this case, Roger and the gang’s problems are dealt with just as tidily as Updike’s sentences. One wonders why he feels the need to take omniscient first-personal narrator liberties when he is capable of such fine regular old first-person perceptions as this one about his childhood: ‘My deserted, husbandless, pitiable mother and I would visit her people, the men horse-faced and leathery and placidly sexless but the women wide sloping mounds of fat trembling on the edge, it seemed to me, of indecency, with their self-conscious shrieks of laughter, their heads at each shriek darting to cover their mouths, their little teeth decayed and crooked, and the steaming food they were copiously setting on the table a malodorous double-entendre, something that excited them, served up in an atmosphere heavy with barn-yard innuendo as well as lugubrious piety.’ Few are the writers who make their quips and witticisms seem so easy. A Quaker on the Divinity Board is ‘ecumenically imperturbable.’ When Roger’s secular wife tries to quiet his boiling irritation with Dale by making light of their common religious ground, he replies, ‘Another end of it … Not distribution. You might call it quality control.’John Banville once said that most writers are either writers of sentences or writers of paragraphs. Though Updike has a great many beautiful paragraphs, he probably leans more toward being a master of sentences. This probably has something to do with the stubbornness of his sensuality. He pays as much attention to a woman’s cleavage as he does to a soiled diaper or a sketchy clinic, and often with little space between them on the page. Updike has his narrator proposition his niece, Verna, for sex, only moments after demanding she get an abortion. It would be to Updike’s technical favor if she wasn’t up for it. She is, in fact, up for it. This forces me to conclude that it is not simply the character but Updike himself who is bad at timing. The book layers abruptness on top of abruptness until the book ends, not with a bang, not with a whimper, but something more like a shrug. It is one of the few times you’ll see a novel where everything that could go wrong seems to go wrong, but where no one really seems miffed or troubled by it. Ironically, just as the intellectually eager, spiritually earnest Dale tries to reach a height at which there are no more questions as to the exact nature of God, Updike gives us a story in which there are no real questions either. Perhaps, after a long career of writing about adultery in some form or another, Updike thought this would be an interesting technique to change things up. It’s just unfortunate that the casualty to this change ended up being a sense of wonder.
Review in progress: first draft, not ready for publication (view spoiler)[In Roger's Version, Updike displays arcane knowledge shaped around the proposition that "wherever theology touches science, it gets burned." The person who gets burned in this novel is a computer geek.The Reverend Roger (that is, Chillingworth) Lambert, professor in a divinity school, prefers the sanctuary to the laboratory. As he says, "'It is very important for my mental wellbeing that I keep my thoughts directed away from areas of contemplation that might entangle me.'" But entangled he becomes with the introduction of Dale (that is, Dimmesdale) Kohler, a research assistant in the computer lab. Roger tells his tale with a droll self-irony; he is skeptical and irreverent, but he does believe. His faith in "the Lord's unsleeping witness and strict accountancy" has little patience with the binary code a the computer.Yet Dale, himself one of the faithful, thinks that he can use computers to prove God's existence, and he needs Roger's help in securing a grant to support his research. Wondering whether the proof of reason will diminish the mystery of faith, Roger suspects that to reveal God's face is to eliminate God's majesty. Thus Updike explores the ancient dilemma of humanity's need to know and its fear of knowledge, and he asks an equally ancient question: is religious faith stronger when long-held beliefs are protected from scrutiny or when they are subjected to challenge? Why, asks Roger, should he revere a God who allows himself to be "intellectually trapped"" Lambert knows his Barth: such a God would not be God. But he ostensibly backs Dale's project while indirectly teaching Dale that the formulas of science are no match for the unreason of faith.Roger's wife Esther (that is, Hester) is bored. Like many of Updike's women, Esther is a nonbeliever. Domestic disaster masks religious uncertainty, because God, Updike suggest, blesses the flesh as well as the spirit. Epigraphs from Karl Barth and Kierkegaard suggest that he is setting a confrontation between faith and reason. To his usual interplay of sex, sin, and salvation, he adds the theories of science. One thinks immediately of Hawthorne's Aylmer ("The Birthmark") and Rappaccini ("Rappaccini's Daughter"). Updike also refer to, Friedrich Nietzsche, Gian Bernini, Lucretius, Martin Luther, Marcion, Thomas Aquinas, Paul Dirac, Albert Einstein, Paul Tillich, Ludwig Wittgenstein, Ferdinand de Saussure, Dietrich Bonhoeffer, and Charles Darwin as well as the physics of the Big Bang Theory, Boolean algebra, and Christian heresies. (hide spoiler)]
What do You think about Roger's Version (1996)?
As much of a fan I am of Updike, I couldn't even get through this one. Once again, adultery takes over the novel like some annoying fog that clouds whatever development the plot or the characters could be experiencing. I felt as if Updike's descriptive talents were wasted quite a bit in this one. I felt as if I was just reading extremely explicit sex scenes for characters I absolutely despised. And when that wasn't happening, I was listing to their circular narrow minded existential arguments that really didn't conclude much.
—Kwaku Acheampong
Roger Lambert, you might say, takes creepiness to new heights, or shall I say, depths. Despite a tenured professorial position and a fairly attentive wife, he can't seem to keep his hands off his nubile niece. Worse, he fails to protect the niece's tragic child from abuse. Roger is not what you might call a sympathetic character. There is a strong note of misogyny and racism throughout this book, some of it seemingly projected by the author. Calling the child a "tarbaby", repeatedly referring to the shape of its nose and other African characteristics--politically correct, this is not. The year was 1986, and I imagine Irving's later novels must be more enlightened, or at least I would hope so. Nevertheless, the writing is strong, if somewhat text-booky in sections. I don't know anyone who talks like the characters in this book; then again, the university setting may be a world unto itself. I had to take points off for the sheer sleaze-ball factor; if Irving was trying to present a sympathetic view of a near-pedophile, he did not succeed in my case. However, the book did keep my interest throughout, except for the repetition of the young zealot's scientific case for God, which was expounded upon ad nauseum. An interesting concept novel, rendered in somewhat hit or miss fashion.
—Lori
Roger Lambert, a professor of divinity is certain that God must be accepted on faith (though we get the impression that perhaps his own faith is walking on rather slippery rocks). His student, Dale Kohler is convinced that God may be proven through science, or more specifically through computer science; His Divine Majesty reduced to a series of ones and zeroes.Roger's Version is a snapshot of man working through late middle age in a not so graceful fashion. Responding to a world of strained social forces, failing marriages and his own rather tawdry sexual urges, Lambert is not going to a destination, but just trying to get through circumstances as they arise. All this amidst the struggle between the purely rational and the instinctual – think of the balance between the cerebral cortex and the hypothalamus.As usual, well done Mr. Updike.
—John Harder
