Roger's Version (Penguin Modern Classics) - Softcover

Updike, John

Softcover

ISBN 10: 014118843X ISBN 13: 9780141188430

Publisher: Penguin Classics, 2006

Synopsis

Middle-aged, brilliant and bored, Roger Lambert is a professor of Divinity at a New England university. Firmly convinced that religious belief can only justified by recourse to pure faith, he is dismissive when visited by a gangling student who claims, with evangelical zeal, that computer technology is on the brink of proving the existence of God. But when his unhappy wife flings herself into an affair with the younger man, and Roger's faith in his own placid life is thrown into question. With his marriage close to collapse, he finds himself increasingly drawn to his own half-niece, the nineteen-year-old Verna, in this cunning and comic exploration of religion, uncertainty and passion.

About this title

Review

"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"

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"

About the Author

John Updike was born in 1932 in Shillington, Pennsylvania. He is the author of over fifty books, including The Poorhouse Fair; the Rabbit series (Rabbit, Run; Rabbit Redux; Rabbit Is Rich; Rabbit At Rest); Marry Me; The Witches of Eastwick, which was made into a major feature film; Memories of the Ford Administration; Brazil; In the Beauty of the Lilies; Toward the End of Time; Gertrude and Claudius; and Seek My Face. He has written a number of collections of short stories, including The Afterlife and Other Stories and Licks of Love, which includes a final Rabbit story, Rabbit Remembered. His essays and criticism first appeared in publications such as the New Yorker and the New York Review of Books, and are now collected into numerous volumes. Collected Poems 1953-1993 brings together almost all of his verse, and a new edition of his Selected Poems is forthcoming from Hamish Hamilton.

His novels, stories, and non-fiction collections have won have won the Pulitzer Prize, the National Book Award, the PEN/Faulkner Award, the American Book Award, the National Book Critics Circle Award, the Rosenthal Award and the Howells Medal.

Updike graduated from Harvard College in 1954, and spent a year at Oxford's Ruskin School of Drawing and Fine Art. From 1955 to 1957 he was a member of staff at the New Yorker, and he lived in Massachusetts from 1957 until his death in January 2009.

About this edition

• Publisher: Penguin Classics
• Publication date: 2006
• ISBN 10: 014118843X
• ISBN 13: 9780141188430
• Binding: Paperback
• Number of pages: 352