Roger's Version: A Novel [Paperback]

John Updike (Author)

Book Description

Publication Date: August 27, 1996

As Roger Lambert tells it, he, a middle-aged professor of divinity, is buttonholed in his office by Dale Kohler, an earnest young computer scientist who believes that quantifiable evidence of God’s existence is irresistibly accumulating. The theological-scientific debate that ensues, and the wicked strategies that Roger employs to disembarrass Dale of his faith, form the substance of this novel—these and the current of erotic attraction that pulls Esther, Roger’s much younger wife, away from him and into Dale’s bed. The novel, a majestic allegory of faith and reason, ends also as a black comedy of revenge, for this is Roger’s version—Roger Chillingworth’s side of the triangle described by Hawthorne’s Scarlet Letter—made new for a disbelieving age.

Editorial Reviews

From Publishers Weekly

Sex and its combinations and permutations apart, two of Updike's commanding, long-standing intereststheology and various kinds of sciencecome together to form the matrix of his new novel. The conflicting ideas are as ancient as time: reason versus faith; science versus religion; belief versus any of the forms of unbelief. The contestants representing the fundamental opposition are the narrator, Roger Lambert, 52, a former minister, now a professor of divinity at a New England university, theologically a (Karl) "Barthian all the way" with a civilized tolerance for heretics and the steadfast conviction that God must be taken on faith; and Dale Kohler, 28, a computer scientist fixed in the belief that at the base of all science "God is showing through," now working on a definitive demonstration by computer technology of God's existence. That would keep anyone busy, but Dale finds a few hours a week for an affair with Roger's angry, unhappy wife, and Roger's version of belief does not prevent him from having a brief fling with his half-sister's daughter, herself an unmarried mother. For all Updike's finesse and dexterity in the deployment of ideas, there is more arcane computerology here than readers, including his most devoted, can digest by force-feeding, and probably more theology as well. Most readers will also think the characters contrived, mouthpieces for the perspectives they espouse.
Copyright 1986 Reed Business Information, Inc. --This text refers to the Hardcover edition.

From Library Journal

Updike's 12th novel continues his portrayal of middle America in all its social, religious, and cultural ramifications. Divinity professor Roger Lambert is visited by Dale Kohler, an earnest young student who wants a grant to prove the existence of God by computer. The visit disrupts Roger's ordinary existence, bringing him into contact with the wild and sexy Verna (his half-sister's daughter), and leading to his wife's affair with Dale. Updike spends a great deal of time in this novel discussing religion, sex, and computers, not always to the advantage of the characters. There are some fine Updike touchesjust the right phrase or detailbut it still adds up to a rather lifeless work (perhaps intentionally so). Roger's is an unattractive character with whom we only occasionally become truly involved. Roger's Version is more Marry Me than Rabbit Is Rich. Thomas Lavoie, formerly with English Dept., Syracuse Univ., N.Y.
Copyright 1986 Reed Business Information, Inc. --This text refers to the Hardcover edition.

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Product Details

• Paperback: 368 pages
• Publisher: Random House Trade Paperbacks (August 27, 1996)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0449912183
• ISBN-13: 978-0449912188
• Product Dimensions: 5.5 x 0.8 x 8.3 inches
• Shipping Weight: 10.6 ounces (View shipping rates and policies)
• Average Customer Review: 4.3 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (14 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #808,414 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

More About the Author

John Updike was born in 1932, in Shillington, Pennsylvania. He graduated from Harvard College in 1954, and spent a year in Oxford, England, at the Ruskin School of Drawing and Fine Art. From 1955 to 1957 he was a member of the staff of The New Yorker, and since 1957 lived in Massachusetts. He was the father of four children and the author of more than fifty books, including collections of short stories, poems, essays, and criticism. His novels won the Pulitzer Prize (twice), the National Book Award, the National Book Critics Circle Award, the Rosenthal Award, and the Howells Medal. A previous collection of essays, Hugging the Shore, received the 1983 National Book Critics Circle Award for criticism. John Updike died on January 27, 2009, at the age of 76.

Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

9 of 9 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Remember the '80s?, March 19, 2009

By 

Outside Looking In (New England) - See all my reviews

This review is from: Roger's Version: A Novel (Paperback)

It was Ian McEwan's piece on John Upike in the New York Review of Books that made me finally take "Roger's Version" off the shelf. An Updike acolyte, I had yet to read this book, but as McEwan focused on Updike's vision of a `dead spot' at the center of America, a recurring theme in Updike that McEwan notes in "Roger's Version," I knew it was time to crack it. McEwan notes that in this book `that dead spot was the ruined inner city of `Roger's Version,' a spoiled landscape through which a divinity professor takes a thirty-page stroll - one of the great set pieces of the entire body of work...'

Indeed. "Roger's Version" is a book that is loaded with landmines - lines, sometimes paragraphs, that a casual reader might quickly gloss over (and there are so many). But it is here that Updike is really making his points.

His uncanny, unsparing and totally accurate rendering of the inner city `hood is certainly a Boston area locale, but Updike is eerily prescient in that his description of a place that is very similar to Lowell, Mass., down to a multi-level that has survived a fire: `On this same corner a building, its lower floor reshingled in stylish irregular shades, had survived a fire in its top floors, which had left charred window frames empty of sashes; but the bar downstairs continued open, and sounds from within - the synthetic concussions of a video game. . . indicated a thriving business, well before the Happy Hour though it was.'

This is an exact description of the Rainbow Café, (a Kerouac haunt) though the fire did not happen until years after "Roger's Version" was published.

Here are some other landmines:

On Christianity: `How did those Israelites get their hooks into us so deeply, sticking us with their frightful black Bible and it imprecations while their modern descendants treat the matter as a family joke, filling their own lives with violin music and clear-eyed, Godless science? L'Chaim! Compared with the Jews we protestants do indeed dwell in the valley of death.'

On racial relations in America in the `80s, as he describes the guests at a faculty cocktail party, noting an African-American couple in attendance: `... and the Vanderluytens, to give our gathering the factitious jolly racial mix of a Coca-Cola commercial on television...'

And Updike's rendering of a night spent crunching code in a (very 1980s) university computer lab is stunning. `Vague sounds from elsewhere in the building - elevator doors opening and closing, cables singing in the black shaft, surges of humming on the floor below - indicate the presence of either of other night workers or else of automated workings, of timers and thermostats inflexibly sending their signals.'

As was his habit, Updike populates this book with topical references to when it was composed (the mid-`80s). There is Cyndi Lauper's `Girls Just Wanna Have Fun' as well as President Reagan's `Bonzo Goes to Bitburg' moment. And here Updike's bedrock conservatism is laid bare (as well as a gift of prophesy): `And yet it seemed to me that we all existed inside Reagan's placid, uncluttered head as inside a giant bubble, and that the day might come when the bubble burst, and those of us who survived would look back upon this present America as a paradise.'

Most commentators have referred to "Roger's Version" as one of Updike's lesser accomplishments. But to this reader Updike is as on top of his game here as he is in the Rabbit books. There are so many gems, so many brilliant observations, in this book.

But ultimately "Roger's Version" is about God and about life and about death - and Updike is unsparing in his assessment of the Big Questions:
`There are few things which, contemplated, do not like flimsy trapdoors open under the weight of our attention into the bottomless pit below.'

And the clincher:

`What was this desolation in Dale's heart, I thought, but the longing for God - that longing which is, when all is said and done, our only evidence of His existence?'

5 of 5 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars A worthy novel from a living master, September 30, 2006

By 

Scott George (Los Angeles, CA USA) - See all my reviews
(REAL NAME)   

This review is from: Roger's Version: A Novel (Paperback)

I am an avid reader of John Updike, but I sometimes have trouble relating to some of his characters.

This novel centers around the theme of faith versus science in the world of divinity professor Roger Lambert, who is aging and questioning many things these days. When confronted by a faithful computer science student who believes he can use computers to prove the existence of God. Lambert is attracted to the idea and the debate but is, ultimately, intent on discouraging or discrediting the students efforts.

As is always the case, the book is about much more than the theme. Updike captures the mood of the Reagan era, the environment of a decaying Northeastern city, and the attitudes and changes that come with aging like no other author can. This book shows, yet again, why Updike is a modern master of fiction. It is intellectual and engaging.

7 of 8 people found the following review helpful:

4.0 out of 5 stars Sublime, September 12, 2000

By 

roGER - See all my reviews

This review is from: Roger's Version (Hardcover)

Updike at his effortless best in this profound yet brilliantly flowing novel that explores the alkward relationship between religion and science...

The story is narrated by Roger, a morally dubious yet entertaining and witty doctor of divinity at an Eastern university. Roger is approached by a gangling, spotty computer scientist (who is also a born-again Christian) seeking a grant to "scientifically" prove the existance of god!

Things get complicated when the student begins having an affair with Esther, Roger's wife, while he himself begins an affair with a distant relative who lives across town in a housing project. Within this simple yet touching quadrangle of relationships come excepts from Roger's lectures on heretics, and comments on modern cosmology...

Add to this Updike's effortlessly telling descriptions, from the feel of cold streets to the elaborate rituals of academic board meetings and you have a very fine novel indeed.

One slight critisism - the computer technology so lovingly described is virtually obsolete already. This makes Roger's Version an unusally dated Updike work.