Roger's Version
John Updike, 1986
Knopf Doubleday
480 pp.
ISBN-13: 9780449912188
Summary
A born-again computer whiz kid bent on proving the existence of God on his computer meets a middle-aged divinity professor, Roger Lambert, who'd just as soon leave faith a mystery.
Soon the computer hacker begins an affair with professor Lambert's wife — and Roger finds himself experiencing deep longings for a trashy teenage girl. (From the publisher.)
Author Bio
• Birth—March 18, 1932
• Where—Reading, Pennsylvania, USA
• Death—January 27, 2009
• Where—Danvers, Massachusetts
• Education—A.B., Harvard University; also studied at the
Ruskin School of Drawing and Fine Art in Oxford, England
• Awards—National Book Award for The Centaur, 1964;
Pulitzer Prizer, National Book Critics Circle Award, and
National Book Award for Rabbit Is Rich, 1982; Pulitzer Prize
and National Book Critics Circle Award for Rabbit at Rest,
1990
With an uncommonly varied oeuvre that includes poetry, criticism, essays, short stories, and novels, two-time Pulitzer Prize winner John Updike has helped to change the face of late-20th-century American literature.
Born in Reading, Pennsylvania, Updike graduated summa cum laude from Harvard in 1954. Following a year of study in England, he joined the staff of The New Yorker, establishing a relationship with the magazine that continues to this day. Since 1957, he has lived in two small towns in Massachusetts that have inspired the settings for several of his stories.
In 1958, Updike's first collection of poetry was published. A year later, he made his fiction debut with The Poorhouse Fair. But it was his second novel, 1960's Rabbit, Run, that forged his reputation and introduced one of the most memorable characters in American fiction. Former small-town basketball star Harry "Rabbit" Angstrom struck a responsive chord with readers and critics alike and catapulted Updike into the literary stratosphere.
Updike would revisit Angstrom in 1971, 1981, and 1990, chronicling his hapless protagonist's jittery journey into undistinguished middle age in three melancholy bestsellers: Rabbit Redux, Rabbit Is Rich, and Rabbit at Rest. A concluding novella, "Rabbit Remembered," appears in the 2001 story collection Licks of Love.
Although autobiographical elements appear in the Rabbit books, Updike's true literary alter ego is not Harry Angstrom but Harry Bech, a famously unproductive Jewish-American writer who stars in his own story cycle. In between—indeed, far beyond—his successful series, Updike has gone on to produce an astonishingly diverse string of novels. In addition, his criticism and short fiction remain popular staples of distinguished literary publications.
Extras
• Updike first became entranced by reading when he was a young boy growing up on an isolated farm in Pennsylvania. Afflicted with psoriasis and a stammer, he escaped from his into mystery novels.
• He decided to attend Harvard University because he was a big fan of the school's humor magazine, The Harvard Lampoon.
• Updike has basically won every major literary prize in America, including the Guggenheim Fellow, the Rosenthal Award, the National Book Award in Fiction, the O. Henry Prize, the American Book Award, the National Book Critics Circle Award, the Union League Club Abraham Lincoln Award, the National Arts Club Medal of Honor, and the National Medal of the Arts. (Author bio from Barnes & Noble.)
Book Reviews
[Discussions of God's existence] might at first sound like alien territory for Mr. Updike, and yet ... it provides him with a comfortable armature on which to drape some of his favorite preoccupations. Questions of faith and existential doubt, after all, hover along the margins of many of his novels—surfacing ... most recently in The Witches of Eastwick, which featured the Devil in a starring role—and his heroes, over the years, have all suffered from ''the tension and guilt of being human.'' Torn between ... spiritual yearnings and ... self-fulfillment, they hunger for salvation even as they submit to the demands of the flesh .... [In this novel, Updike's] unpleasant characters might make for rather grim reading, but by presenting them through the scrim of his narrator, Mr. Updike diffuses some of their vitriol. Further, his command of narrative techniques—his orchestration of emotional and physical details, his modulation of voice, his quick, lyric facility with language—is so assured in this novel, so fluent, that even the most hesistant reader is soon drawn irresistibly into Roger's fictional world.
Michiko Kakutani - New York Times
Sex and its combinations and permutations apart, two of Updike's commanding, long-standing interests in theology and various kinds of science come 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.
Publishers Weekly
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 touches—just the right phrase or detail—but 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.
Library Journal
Discussion Questions
Use our LitLovers Book Club Resources; they can help with discussions for any book:
• How to Discuss a Book (helpful discussion tips)
• Generic Discussion Questions—Fiction and Nonfiction
• Read-Think-Talk (a guided reading chart)
Also consider these LitLovers talking points to help get a discussion started for Roger's Version:
1. The subject of Roger's Version is the age-old argument between faith and science—and how one can know the existence of God. Talk about the ways in which Updike uses his novel to portray this philosophical debate?
2. Do you find the discussions between Roger and Dale intriguing and enlightening? Or do you find them a heavy-handed drag on the flow of the novel? In other words, were you interested or bored with this book?
3. How does Esther's pregnancy reflect, in a very human way, the theological questions that Kohler and Lambert ponder?
4. Consider the parallels of this novel with Hawthorne's The Scarlet Letter (1850): the names Roger (Chillingworth), (Dimmes)Dale and (H)Esther (Prynne) are clues.
5. Is Roger's "version" the only version in this story? Could there be other versions as well? Can Roger be trusted as a reliable narrator?
(Questions by LitLovers. Please feel free to use them, online or off, with attribution. Thanks.)
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