Roger’s Version by John Updike. Updike presents an entertaining debate on whether we can and should prove God’s existence. Dale Kohler, a computer science student, believes he can, with adequate resources, prove the existence of God using the available scientific knowledge and computers. On the other hand, Roger Lambert, Professor of Divinity, feels that God can only be known through faith. It’s a interesting exercise, but the strength of the book is Updike’s depiction of Professor Lambert and his domestic life: his second marriage to a younger, bored wife, their teenage son, and the appearance of a real hot mess of a niece, a single mother in straightened circumstances. Updike’s keen observations of the characters and their moral decrepitude are very good. Updike is indeed a master chronicler of the American middle class in the late 20th century. On the negative side, there’s a fair amount of abstruse science, mathematics, cosmology and sexual segments that seemed gratuitously pornographic.
Whenever theology touches science, it gets burned. In the 16th century astronomy, in the 17th microbiology, in the 18th geology and paleontology, in the 19th Darwin’s biology all grotesquely extended the world-frame and sent churchmen scurrying for cover in ever smaller, more shadowy nooks, little gloomy ambiguous caves in the psyche where even now neurology is cruelly harrying them, gouging them out from the multifolded brain like wood lice from under the lumber pile. Barth had been right: totaliter aliter. Only by placing God totally on the other side of the humanly understandable can any final safety for Him be secured.
Like most of the neighborhood, she was a fighting liberal, fighting to have her money taken from her. For all her exertions, it never was…. I hoped she would mistake my failure to answer for her own hardness of hearing. But, then these Brahmins are so thickly armored in their own rudeness as to feel hardly any rudeness produced by others.
Why, with a living room, a library, and his own good size bedroom at his disposal, Richie insisted on doing his homework on the very surface where his mother was trying to arrange placemats and dinner plates, while a 10 inch Sony crackled and chattered not a foot from his face, I couldn’t imagine. Or so I said, in repeated admonition. Of course I secretly understood: the primitive appeal of the hearth. Television is – it’s irresistible charm – a fire.
You sleep with someone in a moment of truth and the obligations begin to pile up nightmarishly.