Roger's Version (Penguin Classics) [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?'

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.

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.