Books, Arts & Manners: The Downward Trajectory of John Updike

With Roger’s Version (Knopf, 328 pp., $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 Reverend Roger Lambert, a failed parish pastor turned theology professor in a “liberal” New England divinity school, is the reincarnation of Roger Chillingworth, 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.

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Duane Mehl

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With Roger’s Version (Knopf, 328 pp., $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 Reverend Roger Lambert, a failed parish pastor turned theology professor in a “liberal” New England divinity school, is the reincarnation of Roger Chillingworth, 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.