Roger's Version - A Novel

Zusatztext “Remarkably interesting . . . One finishes it with . . . renewed respect for one of the most intelligent and resourceful of contemporary novelists.”—David Lodge! The New York Times Book Review   “Wonderful reading from beginning to end . . . The precise! laconic bull’s-eye descriptive passages in this novel continually amaze with their absolute accuracy.” —San Francisco Chronicle   “Wonderfully tricky and nakedly sharp-minded . . . Updike’s Roger Lambert is a perfectly 20th-century beast—boastfully wicked in all directions.” —The Washington Post Book World Informationen zum Autor John Updike was born in Shillington, Pennsylvania, in 1932. He graduated from Harvard College in 1954 and spent a year in Oxford, England, at the Ruskin School of Drawing and Fine Art. From 1955 to 1957 he was a member of the staff of The New Yorker . His novels have won the Pulitzer Prize, the National Book Award, the National Book Critics Circle Award, the Rosenthal Foundation Award, and the William Dean Howells Medal. In 2007 he received the Gold Medal for Fiction from the American Academy of Arts and Letters. John Updike died in January 2009. Klappentext As Roger Lambert tells it, he, a middle-aged professor of divinity, is buttonholed in his office by Dale Kohler, an earnest young computer scientist who believes that quantifiable evidence of God's existence is irresistibly accumulating. The theological-scientific debate that ensues, and the wicked strategies that Roger employs to disembarrass Dale of his faith, form the substance of this novel-these and the current of erotic attraction that pulls Esther, Roger's much younger wife, away from him and into Dale's bed. The novel, a majestic allegory of faith and reason, ends also as a black comedy of revenge, for this is Roger's version-Roger Chillingworth's side of the triangle described by Hawthorne's Scarlet Letter-made new for a disbelieving age.I   i   I have been happy at the Divinity School. The hours are bearable, the surroundings handsome, my colleagues harmless and witty, habituated as they are to the shadows. To master a few dead languages, to parade sequential moments of the obdurately enigmatic early history of Christianity before classrooms of the hopeful, the deluded, and the docile—there are more fraudulent ways to earn a living. I consider my years spent in the active ministry, before meeting and marrying Esther fourteen years ago, if not exactly wasted, as a kind of pre-existence, the thought of which depresses me.   Yet when this young man called me at the school and, requesting an appointment, named my half-sister Edna’s daughter Verna as a friend of his, and he explained that he, like me, came from the Cleveland area, my wish to hang up was less strong than my curiosity. I named an afternoon and an hour, and so he came. The time was late October, a time in New England of golden leaves and tumultuous, luminous skies.   He was, I saw as he came in the door, the type of young man I like least: tall, much taller than I, and pale with an indoors passion. His waxy pallor was touched along the underside of his jaw with acne, like two brush burns, and his eyes in their deep bony sockets were an uncanny, sheepish, unutterably cold pale blue, pale almost to colorlessness. He had been wearing a wool knit navy-blue watch cap, which he stuffed into the pocket of his army-surplus camouflage jacket as he stood there awkwardly, taking up too much space and in his embarrassment blinking and looking around, at my bookshelves and through the lancet window beyond my head. His dirty-looking, somewhat curly brown hair, I could see at his temples, was already beginning to thin.   “These are lovely buildings,” he said. “I’ve never been to this part of the university before.”   “It’s a bit out of the way,” I told him, wishing it were even more so. “Where...

Product details

• Authors: John Updike
• Publisher: Random House USA
• Languages: English
• Product format: Paperback / Softback
• Released: 27.08.1996
• EAN: 9780449912188
• ISBN: 978-0-449-91218-8
• No. of pages: 352
• Dimensions: 138 mm x 209 mm x 18 mm
• Series: Random House Publishing Group
• Subject: Fiction > Narrative literature