by John Updike
First published 1997
Roger Lambert teaches divinity at a respectable university and prefers his faith complicated. Then Dale Kohler arrives. This young computer programmer has found God and wants to use technology to prove divine existence. Dale needs Roger's academic backing for his project. Roger finds the idea ridiculous and the young man insufferable. But Dale doesn't give up easily. He starts visiting Roger's home, ostensibly to discuss theology. Soon Dale begins seducing Roger's much younger wife Esther. Roger knows what's happening but feels powerless to stop it. Instead, he finds himself drawn to Verna, his teenage niece who lives nearby in public housing. As Dale pursues his digital quest for God and his affair with Esther deepens, Roger wrestles with his own desires and doubts. The collision between faith and technology, youth and middle age, creates a web of temptation that threatens to destroy everything Roger thought he understood about belief, marriage, and himself.
Genres: fiction, literary-fiction, 20th-century, contemporary, religion, academic
Vibes: emotional, intimate, thought-provoking
Tropes: enemies-to-lovers, unreliable-narrator
Setting: University
Period: 20th-century
Hardcover · Random House Value Publishing