Equal in Sin
Updike, John
Equal in Sin ROGER'S VERSION by John Updike Alfred A. Knopf. 329 pp. $17.95. John Updike always makes it a point to date his works so that we may know they represent a chronicle of our times....
...This was my proof of his existence, I saw—the distance to the impalpable ceiling, the immense distance measuring our abasement...
...It gives Updike a chance to argue that God is far beyond human comprehension, indeed that the only real proof of God is the infinitude between His existence and ours: "Only by placing God totally on the other side of the humanly understandable can any final safety for Him be secured...
...But Roger's version will not wash in the 1980s...
...that this book is about Roger Chillingworth, and that a forthcoming book may be written from the perspective of Hester Prynne...
...Despite himself, Roger responds with some heat to Kohler and revives his flagging religious interest...
...it is full of references to the 1980s, from Cyndi Lau-per to Ronald Reagan's second term...
...So great a fall proves great heights...
...Kohler's claim is that the computer has begun to show signs that God exists and he asks Roger for help in getting a grant to prove his point...
...Updike is not so successful, and one skips a good deal...
...Just below we can see Updike's continuing attempt to define the nature of human depravity and the lust for a connection with God...
...It is no accident that Roger specializes in courses about heresy and the authors of heretical works...
...But the computer theme is only an occasion to parody the jargon which defines Kohler's simplistic plan...
...And Roger follows suit...
...The stagnancy of their lives is broken by Dale Kohler ("like the plumbing"), a flunky in a university computer project...
...In an earlier book, Updike noted that we are "suspended in this one of those dark ages that visits mankind between millennia, between the death and rebirth of gods, when there is nothing to steer by but sex and stoicism and the stars...
...Roger recalls the New England primer, "In Adam's fall/We sinned all," and he understands that the prime agent is woman, who regularly leads a cooperating victim to his predestined downfall...
...It's difficult to give the raw material of philosophical debates in a work of fiction, but of course Dostoevsky and Thomas Mann got away with it...
...his second wife, Esther, seduced him from his vocation as a minister, and they find themselves, in the declining years of their lives, bored with each other and their bourgeois existence...
...Roger Lambert is a professor of theology...
...It doesn't hurt to be told that we're all stewing in our own juices...
...In Hawthorne, Hester Prynne's transgression becomes the basis for his remarkable justification of democracy, the idea that we are all equal—in sin...
...She exhibits a "learned vulgarity," and like others of the 1980s generation "a self-righteous criminality...
...Despite some fine moments (the sex scenes, as usual, are closely and beautifully observed) it's hard to accept Updike's old-fashioned sexism...
...Updike has noted that his earlier book, A Month of Sundays, about a minister, was written from the point of view of The Scarlet Letter's Arthur Dimmesdale...
...Gene Bluestein (Gene Bluestein teaches American Studies at California State University, Fresno...
...The switch is that "there isn't another such treat life can offer, unless you count contract bridge and death...
...That is a lot easier to deal with than all the technical data Updike includes from his readings in cosmology and computer science...
...For Esther is a daugher of Eve whose function is to symbolize the sexuality which defines human depravity...
...So after sleeping with his niece ("partners in incest, adultery, and child abuse") Roger reflects: "I saw how much majesty resides in our continuing to love and honor God even as He inflicts blows upon us—as much as resides in the silence He maintains so that we may enjoy and explore our human freedom...
...Esther, on the other hand, jumps quickly into bed with Kohler, "his bony young body, his obedient and astonished ardor— a luxury deliberately enjoyed on the edge of death, on the edge of a long sliding down into death...
...Roger's Version is no exception...
...But that is only a surface concern...
...In Updike we are asked to acknowledge that women are, indeed, the daughters of Eve and the absolute cause of our downfall...
...He enthusiastically allows himself to be seduced by his half-sister's daughter, who has a penchant for getting pregnant by her black boyfriends...
...Roger's view of depravity is an old puritan idea, and Updike reveals in this book most clearly that his closest literary ancestor is Nathaniel Hawthorne, a main conduit of what I have called literary Calvinism...
...For Roger's Version (as in the King James Version) is a special text, and it centers on the idea of sex...
Vol. 50 • December 1986 • No. 12
