Roger's version.

Roger's Version 

WITH Roger's Version (Knopf, 328pp., $17.95), John Updike has completed a quintet of theological/allegorical novels. The others are Couples, A Month of Sundays, The Coup, and The Witches of Eastwick. In each of these novels, Updike takes his readers a little further down a primrose path to damnation and chaos, a path first laid out inadvertently--or so one would gather from Updike's novels-- by Nathaniel Hawthorne in The Scarlet Letter.

In Roger's Version, the ReverendRoger Lambert, a failed parish pastor turned theology professor in a "liberal' New England divinity school, is the reincarnation of Roger Chilling-worth, the diabolical husband of Hester Prynne in The Scarlet Letter. Allegorically, Roger is the devil, and, like God or any author, he is the omniscient narrator of all things in his story. As a man, he is middle-aged, world-weary, and sexually profligate.

The Reverend Arthur Dimmesdaleof The Scarlet Letter has in Roger's Version become a fundamentalist graduate student in computer sciences named Dale Kohler. Esther, once a choir member in Roger's former parish, now his second wife, is a sociopathic version of Hester Prynne. Verna (ironically, as in spring), Roger's half-niece, is Updike's version of Pearl, Hester's daughter by Dimmesdale.

With Pearl, Hawthorne offered anew form of humanity for a new world--a being in whom the spiritual and carnal drives of human nature were to be united harmoniously. At the end of The Scarlet Letter, little Pearl stands full of potential, ready to realize herself as a woman. In Roger's Version, Pearl has come of age and become Verna, the promiscuous and psychopathic result of the union of spiritual and carnal imperatives in American culture.

Verna, 19 years old, has an illegitimatehalf-black daughter with whom she lives in a publicly funded housing project. She is in love with rock music, alcohol, and dope; she aborts a child with Roger's help, avoids prosecution for child abuse with his help, and finally has sex with willing Uncle Roger. With Verna, Roger provides his own version of the "new man.'

In the Scarlet Letter, Hawthorneattempted to dramatize how spiritual growth may come forth from illicit sexual deeds and circumstances. In Roger's Version, Updike looks down sardonically upon Hawthorne's hopeful sacramental enterprise, and offers in its place a Gotterdammerung: the collapse of the Christian faith, tradition, and culture in American society.

The appearance of the devil in aclerical collar is the key to Updike's novel. In Roger's Version, the world's faithlessness and consequent evil is centered in the Church. The challenge to the Church's evil comes from an unexpected quarter: the "pure' sciences, for four hundred years the traditional enemies of the Church. As Dale Kohler walks into Roger's divinity-school office lair at the beginning of the novel, looking for grant money, Updike sets the stage for theological warfare between the devil and one of God's new "little ones.' The enthusiastic young man wants to prove God's existence via the new physics and computer analysis.

Some three hundred pages later, DaleKohler has fallen victim emotionally, morally, and spiritually to the sexual temptress Esther, who leads him into moral degradation in a manner not worth reading or talking about. Meanwhile, Roger and his insufferably egotistical divinity-school colleagues dismantle Dale theologically. Out of arrogance, ennui, or (in Roger's case) diabolical conviction, they convince Dale that it is theologically absurd to imagine God's existence demonstrable or, indeed, rationally defensible. To cap it all off, Dale's computer data give him an ambiguous message: He cannot by his own "reason and strength' (as Luther would say) prove that God exists behind the Big Bang, or that anything at all exists before the Big Bang.

In the devil's version, God, if Heexists, is inaccessible--totaliter aliter, in the Barthian language Updike so admires. Humanity has of its own free will fallen into a state of complete separation from God, its creator--if indeed there is a creator. That's all the devil can say about God, or man and society in relation to God. As Roger says about Dale's experiment: "Zero is also an answer.' And that is where Updike's theological problems begin.

In theology, zero is indeed a kindof answer; and some Western theologians, ancient and modern, have asserted the absolute disparity between God and His creation. Such developments in theology have, however, in the last two centuries often evolved (as in Barth's case) as heroic and faithful attempts to take God out of the all-devouring jaws of state-controlled or disbelieving churches, of egocentered and value-free psychologists, and of natural scientists committed to the pursuit of material reality only.

If Updike is attempting inthis novel to underscore the necessity of such theological developments in a culture rendered banal and sociopathic by the natural and social sciences and the institutions they have spawned, I salute him, but with my left hand. I stand in awe of his ability to paint our American culture in such starkly critical terms; but I also stand vulnerable to his pornography --to his relentless descriptions of human depravity, of self-inflicted destruction, and perhaps (I am unsure of Updike's or his characters' convictions) of divine condemnation.

Updike "preaches' prophetically, butfails to offer that word of grace his faithful readers need. Thus I must ask, as I have done before: Why do his homines religiosi focus solely on the "problem' of natural suffering and human evil, and, concurrently, of God's goodness or existence? Where is their "Christology,' their faith in the Incarnation and Resurrection, whereby God in orthodox Christian thinking suffers with and for man, leading him to regeneration and final victory over the world, the devil, all suffering, and even death itself?

In Updike's Rabbit Run, the old Lutheranpastor, Kruppenbach, thunders at Harry Angstrom: "Yes, you must suffer, but you must love your pain, because it is Christ's pain.' And in his short story "The Blessed Man of Boston, My Grandmother's Thimble, and Fanning Island,' Updike himself says: "O Lord, bless these poor paragraphs, that would do in their vile ignorance your work of resurrection.' But where has his theology of the Cross and Resurrection gone in recent years?

Updike was confirmed a Lutheranby a pastor who apparently denied the reality of Christ's Resurrection in front of his own confirmation class. Updike has written and spoken of the dramatic impact his pastor's betrayal of the faith had upon him. In a recent interview in the Washington Post (Sept. 29, 1986), he mentioned the incident and said that clergy who are paid to confess the ecumenical creeds should do so as a minimum requirement of their calling.

But is it not necessary bynow to turn the question around and ask Updike about his own sense of calling as a Christian person and writer? He claims to be a practicing Episcopalian. Surely, he can't forever blame the Lutheran pastor of his youth for what are now his own, or his characters', failings in Christian faith and life. Where is his clergy characters' sense of vocation? Where is their love for corporate worship and parish life, their thirst for the sacraments, their prayers: the forms of piety reflected so clearly in the works of Pascal, Kierkegaard, T. S. Eliot, Flannery O'Connor, or even John Cheever--all devoutly Christian critics of their respective societies?

By presenting hopeless and despairingclergy characters, Updike cleaves the Christian faith down the middle, dangling before his readers a fallen world without a saving God. Men of my profession call this kind of communication preaching "law' without "Gospel,' judgment without grace, which is usually considered worse than doing nothing at all. Not even the severest "Calvinist'--certainly not Barth --in celebrating the glory, majesty, and total otherness of God, ever dared to eliminate the good news of the Incarnation. Updike writes these days more like a depressed Unitarian than a Christian.

And that is where the moral andsocial problems of Roger's Version begin. Since the separation between God, nature, and man is complete, anything is permissible. Roger Lambert accepts any and every moral breakdown and outrage in himself or others with a calm and gentle (he would probably call it "liberal') equanimity, which passes for a diabolical imitation of Christ. And the reader may, in turn, find it impossible constantly to remind himself with purity of heart that Roger is the devil in a clerical collar. It proved far too difficult a feat for me.

Lust for knowledge and sex (as inthe original Fall), following upon or creating Angst, acedia, and anomie, seems to be the ordination bond for Updike's clergy. Intellectual despair, relieved by illicit sex, comes with their job description. If such were the case for the majority of Christian clergy in the real world, the Church Catholic would have vanished long ago.

This is no minor problem in Updike'swork. St. James says: "The devils also believe and tremble'--tremble, but remain trapped in a damned state of being. Unless Updike finds the ways and means to reply to his devils with the power of divine grace, the Christian reader must simply avoid his stories.

The "last of the Protestant novelists'(as one reviewer has called him) may already be finding himself in the predicament of Kurt Vonnegut or Philip Roth, doomed to write one novel after another about an inexplicably "evil' universe and mankind--which finally cannot logically be called evil at all. Without a God Who judges and grants grace, the prophetic writer finally renders meaningless, banal, and non-existent the very evils he denounces. If religious, he becomes a Buddhist, not a Barthian--similar, perhaps, to J. D. Salinger. Or if nothing, he writes many more Bech-type novels.

If Roger's Version is read as a propheticdenunciation of American culture in the Eighties, the reader may tackle it gingerly, but skip the obscene descriptions of sexual perversities in which Roger delights. (If Roger is the devil, we may leave those parts to the devil.) The reader will appreciate, however, Updike's descriptions of American small-city life, of community life in a liberal divinity school, of tax-funded city housing projects, of the general sights and sounds of the Eighties. At this sort of impressionistic writing Updike has no peer. And if--as I am--the reader is a former Updike fan, he may pray for a change in Updike's perspective and writing. Roger anticipates criticism of this sort and calls believers "bullies.' But for his own sake--and for ours--Roger (or Updike) needs bullying badly.