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Searching... Monmouth Public Library | Fic Updike, J. | Searching... Unknown |
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Summary
Summary
A born-again computer whiz kid bent on proving the existence of God on his computer meets a middle-aged divinity professor, Roger Lambert, who'd just as soon leave faith a mystery. Soon the computer hacker begins an affair with professor Lambert's wife -- and Roger finds himself experiencing deep longings for a trashy teenage girl.
Author Notes
American novelist, poet, and critic John Updike was born in Reading, Pennsylvania on March 18, 1932. He received an A.B. degree from Harvard University, which he attended on a scholarship, in 1954. After graduation, he accepted a one-year fellowship to study painting at the Ruskin School of Drawing and Fine Art in Oxford, England. After returning from England in 1955, he worked for two years on the staff of The New Yorker. This marked the beginning of a long relationship with the magazine, during which he has contributed numerous short stories, poems, and book reviews.
Although Updike's first published book was a collection of verse, The Carpentered Hen and Other Tame Creatures (1958), his renown as a writer is based on his fiction, beginning with The Poorhouse Fair (1959). During his lifetime, he wrote more than 50 books and primarily focused on middle-class America and their major concerns---marriage, divorce, religion, materialism, and sex. Among his best-known works are the Rabbit tetrology---Rabbit, Run (1960), Rabbit Redux (1971), Rabbit Is Rich (1981), and Rabbit at Rest (1988). Rabbit, Run introduces Harry "Rabbit" Angstrom as a 26-year-old salesman of dime-store gadgets trapped in an unhappy marriage in a dismal Pennsylvania town, looking back wistfully on his days as a high school basketball star. Rabbit Redux takes up the story 10 years later, and Rabbit's relationship with representative figures of the 1960s enables Updike to provide social commentary in a story marked by mellow wisdom and compassion in spite of some shocking jolts. In Rabbit Is Rich, Harry is comfortably middle-aged and complacent, and much of the book seems to satirize the country-club set and the swinging sexual/social life of Rabbit and his friends. Finally, in Rabbit at Rest, Harry arrives at the age where he must confront his mortality. Updike won the Pulitzer Prize for both Rabbit Is Rich and Rabbit at Rest.
Updike's other novels range widely in subject and locale, from The Poorhouse Fair, about a home for the aged that seems to be a microcosm for society as a whole, through The Court (1978), about a revolution in Africa, to The Witches of Eastwick (1984), in which Updike tries to write from inside the sensibilities of three witches in contemporary New England. The Centaur (1963) is a subtle, complicated allegorical novel that won Updike the National Book Award in 1964. In addition to his novels, Updike also has written short stories, poems, critical essays, and reviews. Self-Consciousness (1989) is a memoir of his early life, his thoughts on issues such as the Vietnam War, and his attitude toward religion. He was elected to the American Academy of Arts and Letters in 1977. He died of lung cancer on January 27, 2009 at the age of 76.
(Bowker Author Biography)
Reviews (4)
Publisher's Weekly Review
Sex and its combinations and permutations apart, two of Updike's commanding, long-standing intereststheology and various kinds of sciencecome together to form the matrix of his new novel. The conflicting ideas are as ancient as time: reason versus faith; science versus religion; belief versus any of the forms of unbelief. The contestants representing the fundamental opposition are the narrator, Roger Lambert, 52, a former minister, now a professor of divinity at a New England university, theologically a (Karl) ``Barthian all the way'' with a civilized tolerance for heretics and the steadfast conviction that God must be taken on faith; and Dale Kohler, 28, a computer scientist fixed in the belief that at the base of all science ``God is showing through,'' now working on a definitive demonstration by computer technology of God's existence. That would keep anyone busy, but Dale finds a few hours a week for an affair with Roger's angry, unhappy wife, and Roger's version of belief does not prevent him from having a brief fling with his half-sister's daughter, herself an unmarried mother. For all Updike's finesse and dexterity in the deployment of ideas, there is more arcane computerology here than readers, including his most devoted, can digest by force-feeding, and probably more theology as well. Most readers will also think the characters contrived, mouthpieces for the perspectives they espouse. (September 10) (c) Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved
Kirkus Review
Roger here is Roger Lambert, a grouchy, burnt-out divinity-school professor, a give-no-quarter Karl Barth-ian who one day entertains a visitor in his office: a pale and unprepossessing researcher in the computer facilities of the University. This boy--Dale--has an idea for a grant he'd like funded. By computer analysis, he wants to prove once and for all that God exists. He claims to keep running across significant numbers, sets, relationships--only decipherable to the omnivorous memory of the machine--that lead to some discoverable point upon which God must turn, that simply can't be coincidental. Lambert is less than impressed. The idea seems impious, robbing man of faith, reducing that to an equation. But the ardor of Dale the hacker is splendid, in contrast to Lambert's own ruined religiosity. So strict and punishing is Lambert's disgust at what cinders are left of his faith that someone like Dale is able to utterly flummox him--as well as eventually have an affair with his wife, Esther. In the meantime, Lambert tries to straighten out a slutty half-niece, resulting in a little adultery of his own--as well as offering a lesson in pity and relative evil when the girl mistreats her illegitimate and half-black infant daughter. In a relatively plotless book for Updike, what plot there is--Dale and Esther, Lambert and his niece--seems especially stiff. Maybe it's because so much of the book is spent in long spoken expositions of Dale's computer knowledge--something with which Updike is clearly fascinated. When intellectually fascinated, Updike sometimes becomes entranced (see the section in The Witches of Eastwick where one of the women plays a Bach suite on the cello: meticulously correct technical information becomes a plague on the reader), but the enchantment here is very hard to share: it seems a function of authorial curiosity and play of mind--but it doesn't necessarily claw into any of the characters. What does claw--into Roger Lambert--is a theme Updike has used before but never so explicitly: sex as despair. Using Roger's lecture notes on Tertullian and Barth, Updike gives clear shape here to what his work has been prefiguring for years: ""the flesh is man."" In a book with so demanding a religious/intellectual theme, this is happily startling and quite ironic. It's only too bad that it couldn't have more fully been shown than said. Copyright ©Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.
Booklist Review
Updike's spectacularly challenging twelfth novel is narrated by a former minister, now a professor of divinity, whose life is ironically thrown into disarray when a student insists that scientific evidence proving the existence of God is not only plentiful but also collectible via computer. (Jl 86)
Library Journal Review
Updike's 12th novel continues his portrayal of middle America in all its social, religious, and cultural ramifications. Divinity professor Roger Lambert is visited by Dale Kohler, an earnest young student who wants a grant to prove the existence of God by computer. The visit disrupts Roger's ordinary existence, bringing him into contact with the wild and sexy Verna (his half-sister's daughter), and leading to his wife's affair with Dale. Updike spends a great deal of time in this novel discussing religion, sex, and computers, not always to the advantage of the characters. There are some fine Updike touchesjust the right phrase or detailbut it still adds up to a rather lifeless work (perhaps intentionally so). Roger's is an unattractive character with whom we only occasionally become truly involved. Roger's Version is more Marry Me than Rabbit Is Rich. Thomas Lavoie, formerly with English Dept., Syracuse Univ., N.Y. (c) Copyright 2010. Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.