Criticism > Contemporary Literary Criticism > Updike, John (Vol. 139) - D. J. Enright (review date 2 February 1987)


Updike, John (Vol. 139) - D. J. Enright (review date 2 February 1987)

D. J. Enright (review date 2 February 1987)

SOURCE: “Love Bytes,” in New Republic, February 2, 1987, pp. 41–2.

[In the following review, Enright offers a positive assessment of Roger's Version.]

How clever John Updike is! And how vulgar he can be. That the two qualities manage to coexist, each in so high (or low) a degree, in the same writer, in the same book, passes understanding.

His new novel [Roger's Version] has it wholeheartedly both ways, being about God and Sex. The initial God material is promising, and to some extent delivers what it promises, as did The Witches of Eastwick in that novel's dealings with demonology. Roger Lambert, a professor in the School of Divinity at an unnamed university, is visited by 28-year-old Dale Kohler, an earnest computer operator who believes that at last “God is showing through,” paradoxically via the discoveries of scientists. Total energy and the expansion rate of...

[The entire page is 1230 words long]

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