Updike, John (Vol. 139) - Edward Abbey (review date 28 March 1987)

Edward Abbey (review date 28 March 1987)

SOURCE: “Reading Updike,” in Nation, March 28, 1987, pp. 409–10.

[In the following review, Abbey gives a laudatory appraisal of Roger's Version.]

A professor of theology named Roger Lambert, subsiding comfortably into middle age, is aroused from his dogmatic slumbers by Dale Kohler, a young student of computer science. The year is 1984, the place Boston, and the subjects, always popular, are space, time, the Deity and failure. Why not? Boston has been a hotbed of Christianity since 1620; it is also the home of the Red Sox. In a world that consists essentially of nothing but patterns of organic energy (according to the new physics, now about 85 years old), the two cannot be unrelated.

Young Dale comes to Professor Lambert with a proposition: he wishes to prove the existence of God on a computer printout. Explaining his program, he gives us pages and pages of technical mumbo jumbo from...

[The entire page is 1127 words long]

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