“The Western custom of one wife and hardly any mistresses.”
—H.H. Munro

Roger’s Version, John Updike’s latest novel, can be understood best if seen in intimate and serious connection with Nathaniel Hawthorne’s The Scarlet Letter. First, the cast of characters: Hester (Esther), Arthur Dimmesdale (Dale Kohler), Roger Chillingworth (Roger Lambert), and Pearl (Paula/Poopsie). The setting is New England. In both narratives, adultery is the central incident, and in both Roger must play detective to discover it. In both stories, science and religion/theology are or appear to be locked in combat. Although the differences between Updike and Hawthorne are much more important than the likenesses, they would make no sense without the likenesses. In short, Updike has gone back to his finest novel, The Centaur, in providing a specific literary pattern from the past for interpreting the present (the method of continuous parallels was pointed out as the literary way of the future by T. S. Eliot in his review of Joyce’s Ulysses). Like Eliot himself in The Waste Land, Updike emphasizes the past as being the backdrop which gives meaning to the otherwise fragmentary and incomprehensible present.

In Updike’s version of The Scarlet Letter, the characters are greatly diminished (as well as significantly altered). While both are moral outlaws, Esther has none of Hester’s nobility. Dale, though a Christian believer like Dimmesdale, has none of Dimmesdale’s dignity, nor does he suffer as the Puritan minister did. Roger, like Chillingworth, wishes to punish the partner of his wife’s adultery but lacks Chillingworth’s humanity gone wrong. They are, these moderns, what they have made of themselves in response to the times—people plucked out of a grab bag limb by limb. The emotions of the narrative are also diminished, especially love and passion. After all, the Scarlet “A” stands for amor as much as it does for adulteress, angel, and admirable. The magnificent fervid forest scene between Hester and Dimmesdale is reduced to mere lust. Since Roger has been divorced from Lillian, Esther is his second wife. He “understands” the betrayal of the marriage contract, having been there, so to speak, before Esther and Dale cuckold him. In his novels, Updike has long debated whether marriage is a sacrament or a contract; Roger clearly regards it as a contract. Hence, there is no scarlet letter in Roger’s Version—adultery being so common as to have lost its meaning.

The major difference between the two novels is in Updike’s shift away from Hester (and Hester and Dimmesdale) to Roger and Roger’s debate with Dale; the implicit contest between science and religion is made explicit and becomes the principal subject of Roger’s Version. In a neat turn, the roles of the contestants get switched: Roger, the weary cynic, is the (ex) minister and professor of theology, and Dale, the believer, is the gifted scientist. His object is to demonstrate the existence of God from existing physical and biological data, using the computer—”the new hymn to the majesty of God.” Roger, a hater of intellectual Towers of Babel, is “determined to crush” him. Dale may or may not have lost his faith when the battle is over but has clearly been defeated on the field. In playing the Devil’s advocate, Roger, like Chillingworth, turns himself into the Devil but unlike Chillingworth suffers no final penitence. Paula (Pearl), the truth-teller, calls him the “Bad man”; Verna (Spring), the niece he debauches, says that he is evil.

Readers of Updike’s past work know how important Karl Barth is to him, and Barth is central to this novel, perhaps in a different context. Roger claims initially that he has been a hard-core fideist since the age of 15 and that he has buried his beliefs to keep them safe. He understands Barth, his “own rascally pet,” to mean that only by placing God totally on the other side of the humanly understandable (totaliter aliter) can final safety for Him be secured. (Does God need our protection? He comes to us as He chooses in revelation and redemption; “There is no way from us to God.” By his nature man is flesh and determined to perish.) Barth “would have regarded Dale’s project as the most futile and insolent sort of natural theology.” Man has freely cast himself into chaos through sin.

Dale’s answer to Roger’s Barthian view is crucial: “Your God sounds like a nice safe unfindable God.” The hopelessness of all human activity that flowed from the concept of the wholly Other is the perfect rationalization for Roger to do exactly as he pleases. It pleases him to respond to his Barthian gestalt in two curiously compatible ways. One, he commits deliberate earthly abominations to show how infinite the chasm is between Heaven and earth: incest, abortion, adultery, pornography, the corruption of the innocent, the destruction of another’s faith. Because he is so totally self-centered, the incest motif is emphasized in his sexual relations with his niece and, more importantly, in his passionate desire for Edna, his half-sister—more a kind of twin, since their father planted them in two different women at about the same time. Two, Roger is agnostic and in this most resembles Satan. He is afraid of the earth and hates life, an “abortive to-do.” He values his escape from the ministry and from “the common incurable muddle and woe.” He does not want his “hot Barthian nugget” dragged into the light of day.

Roger is an utterly hateful man, singular among Updike’s characters. He confesses to having a dark side (is Edna the light side?); when angry he generates smoke. To him the heretics are much more pleasant, agreeable, and personable than the orthodox. Every living creed is grotesque. Dale accuses him of being a member of the Devil’s party, and he certainly fits Dale’s description of the Devil as doubt, the one who makes us “spurn the life we’ve been given.” The sin of abortion looms large in the text, particularly affecting Updike’s diction. Anyone (including God) who tries to explain the meaning of life is an “old bluffer.” Roger destroys everyone with whom he comes in contact, except Esther, who turns out to be quite a surprise to him. The environment, as he describes it, is constantly gray, overcast, and threatening. None of the theologians at the university can be described as believers; those we know anything about have the morals of randy tomcats. The major question of the novel is expressed in one of the four epigraphs. Was it waste, this pouring of ointment by the woman of Bethany on the Savior, in an acknowledgment of his death and resurrection (Matthew 26:8)? While the book is consciously framed by holy days (Thanksgiving, Christmas, Epiphany, Lent), there is no attention paid to Easter. The New Testament, with its persuasive picture of our warm, caring, charming, human God might as well not exist as far as Roger is concerned. Barth is his Scripture; he learns from him that all human activity is hopeless and that Kierkegaard’s new hymn of love to the infinite majesty of God confirms the chasm between Heaven and earth. For all practical purposes, the God of Scripture ceases to be. The world belongs to the great prince Satan.

This is Roger’s version, and it must remain clear in the reader’s mind that Roger has been doing all the talking. Is it Updike’s version? A link between the two can be drawn. Both are brilliant and clever. Both make the same diagnosis of the terrible failure of liberal modernism. Both use diction that is awesome in its variety and texture. Both are drawn to Karl Barth, who appears to be central to their religious thinking. It seems that the claim that Updike is a Christian novelist is on the line. Despite his ambiguous stance toward marriage and despite his continuing addiction to pornography, the claim is a real one: He has never been very Incarnational in spirit, but he has never been able to let God alone, coming back to Him repeatedly, almost Jacob-like as he wrestles . . . with what? Is this book a watershed, as Marry Me was?

But in the final instance, Updike and Roger are not alike. Roger’s version is one of Updike’s two or three most important novels because in it he has taken on the Devil and exposed him for what he is: cruel, clever, able to quote Scripture (Barth), cynical, and world-weary beyond bearing.

On the other hand, if Roger is the Devil or of the Devil’s party and the Devil is the Father of Lies, what are we then to make of this entire work? Perhaps Dale and Esther are not at all like Roger’s Version of them. And so for everything else. If Roger is from start to finish an unreliable narrator, the reader finds himself in a pretty kettle of fish. Or is that in itself the key? Esther’s version, in that case. Dale’s version, and more to the point, Updike’s version would be considerably different in the way each would address the question in Matthew, “To what purpose is this waste?”

 

[Roger’s Version, by John Updike (New York: Alfred A. Knopf) $17.95]