PEARL K. BELL
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and sex, plus a new source of pyrotechnical dazzle, computer sci–
ence , with a large helping of physics thrown in for good measure.
There is, of course, a story, and it begins when Roger Lambert,
a defrocked Protestant minister who is now a professor of theology
(his specialties are heresy and blasphemy) at an unnamed Divinity
School , obviously Harvard, is approached by Dale Kohler, a scruffy
research assistant in the university's computer lab. Dale believes he
can prove the existence of God scientifically with a computer, and he
wants Roger to help him get a grant. A fleet-footed pro at theological
disputation, Roger tries to dissuade the God-intoxicated hacker from
his "aesthetically and ethically repulsive" project with a barrage of
arguments ranging across an immense arc of history and exegesis
from the Hebrew prophets , Tertullian and the Gnostics to Karl Barth
and Paul Tillich . Roger draws upon a heavy load of Latin (which
Updike , unlike Umberto Eco, obligingly translates for the ignorant),
and Dale dumps an even heavier one of computer lore that is unin–
telligible (and untranslatable) to the layman. But the younger man
persists in his madness, obstinately certain that the right number–
crunching will reveal the face of God on his screen as though it were
a Shroud of Turin in pixels .
There is a more salacious reason for Dale's presence in the
story. He is a friend of Roger's niece Verna, a nineteen-year-old slut
living with her illegitimate black baby in a squalid housing project
not far from the university. Roger is a theologian but no angel, cheer–
fully admitting he derives the same "comfort and inspiration" from
pornography that he does from religious texts. While he slides into
Verna's bed, his restless wife finds relief from her chronic ennui in
organ-grinding sex with Dale . Sex is rarely left to the imagination in
Updike's novels, but it is heavy-handed anatomical dullness in
Roger's
Version .
Indeed, the entire novel, despite the metaphoric opulence that
is the hallmark of Updike's virtuosity, has a leaden, laborious air.
We become altogether too conscious of the exorbitant effort the nov–
elist had to make in mastering the scientific arcana. As the common
reader, dazed and unscientific, stumbles through the dense techno–
logical underbrush of bytes and algorithms and the Planck constant
and Mandelbrot's fractiles, and fails to make any sense of "a Higgs
field tunnelling in a quantum fluctuation through the energy barrier
in a false-vacuum state," we want to remind Updike that his word–
processor is off the gauge. There is too much learning and not enough
wisdom. Perhaps only a writer with the assets of Thomas Pynchon-
