Roger's Version: A Novel
by John Updike
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Book Summary Information
Author: John UpdikeEdition: Paperback
Audio: English (Unknown); English (Original Language); English (Published)
Published: 1996-08-27
ISBN: 0449912183
Number of pages: 368
Publisher: Random House Trade Paperbacks
Book Reviews of Roger's Version: A Novel
Book Review: Remember the '80s?
Summary: 5 Stars
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?'
Summary of Roger's Version: A Novel
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.Literary Books
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