Theology and the Computer Roger's Version

By Paul Gray

Roger Lambert, 52, is an assistant professor at a divinity school in a Northeastern U.S. city that sounds, as he describes it, a lot like Boston. He is also an ordained Methodist minister, although he gave up active duty 14 years earlier, after the love affair that scandalized his parishioners and broke up his first marriage. Esther, Roger's partner in adultery and now his second wife, comes from a family with money. The Lamberts live in a comfortable house full of books and tasteful furniture. Amid his predictable academic routine, the husband notices that his younger wife may be getting bored; when he comes home in the evenings, he finds her well into the wine they will drink with dinner and listening to opera on the stereo. Roger does not want to think too hard about this and many other things as well: "I am a depressive. It is very important for my mental well-being that I keep my thoughts directed away from areas of contemplation that might entangle me and pull me down."

The news that a theologian of sorts is the main character in John Updike's twelfth novel will not thrill all of the author's devoted readers, although it should not surprise them either. The Poorhouse Fair (1959), Updike's first % novel, was an allegory explicitly framed around contradictory notions of the nature of God. The author's reputation and fame grew with his extraordinarily graceful and graphic renderings of contemporary manners and mores. Couples (1968), the three Rabbit novels, the two collections of stories about the Jewish writer and malingerer Henry Bech, all present surfaces so intriguing that it is possible to ignore their depths. But a Protestant sense of sin peeks through most of Updike's fiction -- sometimes, as in A Month of Sundays (1975), expressed directly by an agonized clerical narrator. Roger Lambert, another lapsed preacher, comes from this austere region of Updike's imagination, suffering not doubts now but numbness. It is the job of Roger's Version to stir its hero back to moral life.

The disruptive agent is Dale Kohler, 28, a computer whiz kid at the university who comes to Roger with a bizarre request: a grant from the divinity school to support the young man's belief that the existence of God can be scientifically proved by processing the accumulating mountain of data about the universe. "God is breaking through," he announces. "They've been scraping away at physical reality all these centuries, and now the layer of the little left we don't understand is so fine God's face is staring right out at us." Crunch enough numbers through the right program, the visitor promises, and the purposeful hand of the Creator will emerge for all to see. Roger's response is not encouraging: "I must confess I find your whole idea aesthetically and ethically repulsive. Aesthetically because it describes a God Who lets Himself be intellectually trapped, and ethically because it eliminates faith from religion, it takes away our freedom to believe or doubt. A God you could prove makes the whole thing immensely, oh, uninteresting."

Nevertheless, Dale receives a modest stipend to begin his research; he also gets the enthusiastic sexual attention of Roger's wife. The cuckolded professor, who possesses an odd, out-of-body ability to witness and describe the trysts between Esther and Dale, takes this infidelity and betrayal calmly. For Roger's interest has been captured by his niece Verna, a friend of Dale's, who is the abandoned and unwed mother of a half-black infant and who lives in a housing project not far from Roger's home. Although he does not want to claim responsibility for this distant and disgraced relative, the professor is attracted by her provocative vulgarity and the squalor of her circumstances.

Having established this mismatched foursome, Updike translates it into a quadrilateral conundrum: the young partners looking for certainty through sex with elders who expect only momentary reprieves from the knowledge of their own limitations and eventual deaths. At issue is the possibility of redemption, but the demands of bodies in the here and now keep getting in the way.

So does the talk, which sometimes sounds like intelligent speech turned up to a volume of impenetrable noise. An incidental character remarks to Dale at a cocktail party, "As you know, inside the Planck length and the Planck duration you have this space-time foam where the quantum fluctuations from matter to non-matter really have very little meaning, mathematically speaking. You have a Higgs field tunnelling in a quantum fluctuation through the energy barrier in a false-vacuum state, and you get this bubble of broken symmetry that by negative pressure expands exponentially . . ."

It is hard to tell at such moments whether Updike is parading knowledge or satirizing it. Roger's Version may be a novel that only the author's most faithful followers will love at first sight. Newcomers might be advised to start with Rabbit or Bech before tackling this dazzling and sometimes maddening display of talent and erudition: the labor of a serious artist to make comprehensible a mystery that cannot be explained.