Reading Roger’s Version

On Roger’s Version, theology, desire, and the frustrations of reading John Updike

I cannot help myself but be a connoisseur of midcentury American literary fiction; subsequently, that means I read a lot of the typical white men and have thoughts about them. Some I greatly enjoy, others not so much. But the one I’ve wrestled the most with has been John Updike. I’ve read two of the Rabbit Angstrom novels and “A&P” was nothing short of a revelation in my high school English class (writing could be like this??!?! My 15-year-old mind was absolutely blown).

I decided I wanted to move a bit further afield into Updike oeuvre and, after doing a little background reading and consideration, I decided to read his 1986 novel Roger’s Version. Here’s the summary of the novel courtesy of the Library of America:

Roger’s Version (1986), a reimagining of Nathaniel Hawthorne’s The Scarlet Letter, explores Updike’s recurring themes of the tension between faith and reason and the pull of sexual desire, as well as the cosmic implications of contemporary scientific breakthroughs. Roger Lambert, a middle-aged divinity professor, finds himself approached by Dale Kohler, an enthusiastic graduate student in computer science, who claims that recent technical advances in computing can establish the existence of God “as a fact.” In conversation, the two men grapple with fundamental questions of theology and philosophy—but their interests and passions are not confined to the mind and spirit. In a tour-de-force refashioning of the love triangle at the heart of Hawthorne’s classic tale, each man becomes involved in an extramarital affair. As the twin adulteries unfold, the novel moves searchingly among spiritual and social concerns, and Updike, taking an urban setting evocative of Boston and Cambridge, highlights with characteristic sharpness of observation the contrasts and cruelties of Ronald Reagan’s America.

It’s pretty clear to me why Roger’s Version is frequently pointed to as one of Updike’s best novels. You see some of the recurring themes from the Rabbit novels—sex, theology, relationships, America—but it’s presented in a more direct or less ponderous way. The two Rabbit novels I’ve read (Rabbit, Run and Rabbit Redux) are a bit more ground in their historical moment (the late-50s/Kerouac-era and the late 60s) while Roger’s Version is a bit removed from that, though it is obviously and quite pointedly set in the Reagan moment. The “politics,” as it were, are not so contemporary to the composition of the novel that there’s a little more that is timeless to it (though I think it does have something to say about that moment in time in America, but it’s not at the heart of the novel).

I also found the framing of the novel as a kind of re-telling of The Scarlet Letter to be interesting as well. I also think for Updike, who is in many ways the decent of Hawthorne and that northeasterly sensibility (though not a Transcandentalist), it makes senes to engage with that. I’m certainly not alone in seeing that connection, as Philip Roth wrote upon Updike’s passing: “John Updike is our time’s greatest man of letters, as brilliant a literary critic and essayist as he was a novelist and short story writer. He is and always will be no less a national treasure than his 19th-century precursor, Nathaniel Hawthorne.” I also think by considering the "narrative” of Hawthorne’s novel but focusing on the antagonistic character of Roger Chillingworth (though with the last name Lambert), it provides for something more interesting than just setting The Scarlet Letter in mid-80s America. Roger’s Version does take Roger’s version of the story and perhaps showed why something like what transpired could happen.

One other thing I found myself noting is that the ways the novel engaged with the tension between religious belief and science called to mind the work of one of my favorite authors, Walker Percy. Percy shares with Updike an interest in Kierkegaard’s philosophy and was a man of both science and religion (though Percy was a Catholic while Updike is a Protestant). Perhaps not The Moviegoer, but I can see connections with The Last Gentleman or Love in the Ruins to this novel by Updike. Were I still a proper literary scholar and if I had read a bit more of Updike’s fiction, it’s a connection I might want to explore.

The issue I find myself wresting with in Updike’s writing is his engagement with, well, sex, to put it bluntly. I don’t think I’m terribly prudish when it comes to what I can read, but I always find how Updike writes about these things to be somewhat strange. Perhaps because they feel so alien relative to everything else he’s writing while someone like Philip Roth makes it feel more central because he’s so engaged with our humanness, our emotions, our bodily experience (because that’s all there is). The entanglements of Roger and Verna as well as Dale and Esther feel shocking, not just because of what is being depicted or considered but how it feels… dropped in. I don’t think Updike puts these things in just to shock us, but it feels that way and it drags me as a reader out of the narrative he’s crafted.

I can certainly see why Roger’s Version is one of the more acclaimed books in John Updike’s oeuvre, but my ultimate reaction to it was a kind of letdown or not enjoying it as much as I think I should. Updike is a writer who frustrates me in that regard. I find his work engaging and I want to read it, but I don’t feel as fulfilled as I think I should. That group of midcentury American authors (let’s be real, mostly white and male) is one that looms large in my mind. I’ve read a great deal of Philip Roth’s writing, and certainly find him funny and masterful, but there are these points of divergence (I think about his strong, negative stance towards religious belief while it’s certainly something I can, at the very least, countenance). Thus Updike seems like a natural fit, but there is this block there that I’ve articulated as part of my reading experience with Roger’s Version. Percy remains perhaps the one to which I’m most connected, though I’ve felt the distance from him given the firmness of faith (and a certain manifestation of faith) in his later novels, though John Cheever has continued to grow in my estimation.

But Roger’s Version fits very much in my experience of Updike’s writing—both engrossing but also frustrating, and yet I feel compelled to read more.