Perversely Ingenious Morality

...Is Updike thinking too of miracle-filled Biblical narratives which also have shared omniscience behind them...

...In Roger's Version, as the graduate student's computer model of the universe grows more elaborate, so does his polymorphous-perverse sex in the attic with Roger's wife...

...In which case you have m equals infinity times nought...

...Reviewed by Robert Gorham Davis Professor emeritus of English, Columbia University When it first was published in 1928 —I was 20 at the time—I read Aldous Huxley's Point Counter Point and became sophisticated overnight...

...As a final benediction Prynne comes silently to have sex with him, one last adultery before he returns to his wife and a new parish...

...In this earlier novel, the then young Marshfield's courtship of the daughter of his ethics professor, Dr...

...Prynne, head nurse of the clinic, secretly reads the patients' journals, usually without comment...

...Toward the ordinary man's God Updike' s personae in these two theological novels are wittily blasphemous...

...Verna is living alone on welfare with her adorable half-black daughter in a dangerous, tenant-abused housing project...

...He observes human bodies like a police coroner, while he theorizes about them out of his favorite heretic Tertullian, with generous quotations from the Latin...

...But Updike, who has read the advanced French theorists, is also experimenting with fiction as such...

...Where Huxley's absurd Lord Gat-tenden was humiliated by the response to his algebraic formula, Updike has used it with impudent success...

...It comes late but certainly, with a teen-age half niece whose presence in Cambridge Roger has ignored until Dale, completing the quadrilateral that is another feature of many Updike novels, persuades him to visit her...

...Well, why not reduce the equation to a simpler form by multiplying both sides by nought...

...Her situation, treated with high realism, licenses Roger (and Updike) to make cruel fun of most liberal attitudes...

...But she loves him, despite his being "so gray and broody, so evil...

...How many ways he finds to individualize pubic hair...

...Her only diversions are rock music, grass and late-night bar dates with local black dudes...

...Doesn't that demonstrate the creation of the universe by an infinite power out of nothing...

...Marshfield makes a plea in return, and to his surprise it is answered...

...Chillingworth, parallels step by step the progress of his future father-in-law's lectures...

...Increasingly in Updike's work hard pornography balances hard doctrine, often on the same page...

...is a sharp-tongued, unpredictable Lolita, at once a sociological disaster and one of the most stubbornly distinctive characters in all Updike's fiction...

...His sexually self-indulgent characters rarely have inner struggles or act on principle or identify themselves with positive goods readers can share...

...Dale proposes to make a computer model of the evolution of man and the universe so complete as to prove that the whole process was directed not by chance but by God...

...How she felt about the sermon on adultery we can only infer, but to the final one, revealing the secure Barthian particle of faith buried beneath all Marsh-field's cynicism, she gives an unexpected O.K...

...If everything comes from the imagination of the omniscient author, why not let a character share that omniscience and perversely imagine (or create...

...Verna (meaning both youth and truth...

...It put the entire culture of the Arnolds and Hux-leys at my disposal, and through the bright lens of comedy made me see how much of human vanity, indignity and absurdity was mixed up with what I had thought of as the pure play of ideas...

...By multiplying the infinity of Barth' s God with the zero of his own Nihilism, Updike has created a perversely ingenious morality play in which two contrasted modern sinners, taking together one step further in sin, usurp salvation...

...Updike's trump card is the unknowable Barthian God who cares nothing for good works and blesses whom he pleases...

...Neither his wife nor Verna thinks Roger has been so helpful to Verna out of natural goodness...

...The setting is a fictionalized Boston-Cambridge of high academe, high technology and dreadful slums...

...From his sense of the absurd and to embarrass his colleagues, Roger helps Dale get the grant...

...His descriptions fuse: "With Esther it all becomes a matter of mouths, openings interlocking and contorted like the apertures and intersections of hyperspace, Veronese surfaces graphed in more colors than nature can normally hold and that not even insects could see...

...While Marshfield is penetrating her, Prynne looks up not at him but at God...

...Marshfield enlivens his journal with imaginary sermons...

...The contemporary theologians he most often cites, Karl Barth and PaulTillich, were adulterers, the latter shamelessly so, a " great amorous jellyfish...

...We feel a surcharge from the author himself in the dismissive wit with which his characters treat "do-gooders...

...Indeed, in the Kierkegaardian leap to faith, Updike seems to omit the ethical stage entirely...

...In Updike's fiction, taken as a whole, adultery is the most engrossing form of social action...

...What kind of God is it that has to be proved...

...You knowthe formula: m over nought equals infinity, m being any positive number...

...Up-dikecangetawaywiththisbecauseheis so keen an observer, so pungent a phrase-maker, so lavish with outrageous carnality...

...The stern Ms...

...So were Carl Jung and Max Weber...

...Since these novels have been presented as high comedies, reviewers tended not to take their contents seriously, or see how reactionary they really are...

...Updike has taken a leaf from Norman Mailer's /I ncieni Evenings, where a boy gifted with the presumed telepathy of New Kingdom Egyptians feels exactly the sex his mother is having in another room...

...In Roger's Version, a computer scientist, a born-again Christian named Dale, seeks out a divinity school professor named Roger in quest of a grant...

...Verna tells him he has "had the hots for her all along...

...One, written with the suavity of a Jerry Falwell, takes off from Christ's remark about the first stone and makes adultery as sacramental as marriage...

...Amos purports to be the journal the Reverend Thomas Marsh-field is required to keep at the psychiatric retreat to which he has been banished after trying to ease the problems of too many female parishioners by going to bed with them...

...In Huxley's novel, Lord Gattenden telephones his scientist brother to announce his discovering proof of the ex-istenceof God...

...That is to say that a positive number is the product of zero and infinity...

...In an almost Victorian happy ending, Verna is reconciled with her parents in the West, and Roger and his wife keep the delightful child until its wound has healed...

...Updike's tongue is not entirely in his cheek...

...But Updike's mind was formed in the '50s, a dead time politically, and he has carried into the '80s a surprising indifference to social or political history and to collective efforts to improve the human lot...

...It can be interpreted as blasphemous or holy, since Prynne has qualities both of Christ and the church...

...Curiously it is Roger, though he is present at neither, who describes both Dale's experiences at the computer panels and in copulative antics on the attic floor with Esther...

...The Absolute's tail was still unsalted...

...in exhaustive detail his wife's infidelities with a young man (Roger is exactly Updike's age), and then have the visions turn out to be fact...

...As bright as Aldous Huxley, John Updike graduated from Harvard summa cum laude in 1954...

...But even from the tone of his brother's voice Lord Gattenden knows his proof is no good...

...Prynne's name, like several in the two novels, derives of course from our American classic of adultery, The Scarlet Letter...

...for most goodness they have merely scorn...

...For Roger there is acon-cluding benediction remarkably like that of A Month of Sundays...

...Only Dale suffers, his grand plan a failure...

...John Updike begins Roger's Version, a theological comedy, with what had been a brief jest in Huxley and carries it to a God-blessed conclusion calculated to displease practically everyone who thinks about religion at all...

...Our first kiss came during Spinoza, more titillatio than hilarius...

...What does all this mean...

...To thank him she seduces him, and from his abasement in incest and adultery he turns his gaze upward, as the nurse Pry nne had done, to the certainty of a God who in his silence and distance lets "us enjoy and explore our human freedom...

...It is illuminating to compare Roger's Version with Updike's previous theological novel, A Month of Sundays— Amos for short...

...This being an Updike novel, Roger has to have his adultery as well...

...When Verna finds herself pregnant again, Roger helps her get an abortion, and when Verna, drugged and desperate, batters her baby, Roger drives the pair to the hospital and fends off an inquiry that might have cost Verna custody of the child...

...Bless you' was all I could say...

...In his rich nonfiction collection Hugging the Shore he proves himself a wider, keener, more discriminating reader than any other of our major novelists...