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World-weary and worldly-wise, John Updike is in his winter years. He's lost his boyish look of shy awkwardness. He still has the thin skewed smile, as if waiting for a schoolroom prank to come off, but he's wizened and ashen now. There's a shadow of caution in his eyes.

At 70, he's well established among élite U.S. writers. His latest novel, Seek My Face (Alfred A. Knopf, 2002), comes atop a massive oeuvre and a wall-full of prestigious literary awards, including a Pulitzer. But he's not won a Nobel to complete his crown, and likely won't. His best work is probably behind him. His detractors think not even that much: that he never produced anything that lived up to the flawed but dazzling promise of his early accomplishments.

And then there's the sex. Updike is notorious for his novelistic randiness. Most people who've never read him know him as that man who writes dirty books. And, to be sure, some of his novels—Couples, Roger's Version, A Month of Sundays—seem only thinly disguised excuses to parade the gaudy excess of America's sexual fetishes. Even when you know he's up to something else—that his sexual explicitness has a cultural critique, even a theological agenda, behind it—it's pretty hard to stomach.

Still, Updike is rare among his ilk. He is, if not a "Christian" novelist, certainly North America's most theological one. Nearly his entire life's work is concerned with theological questions, and a good number of his works hinge on these. How many other contemporary authors could—or would—bandy about the theology of Barth, Tillich, or Bultmann in their novels? Or have page after page of dialogue between characters working out intricate doctrinal positions? Updike does this repeatedly and with discernment.

He also does it, apparently, with vested interest. Unflinchingly using words like infralapsarianism, he turns arcane theology into vivid drama. And the outcome matters.

Updike is literary heir to Nathaniel Hawthorne, that grim fabulist of the Civil War era. Hawthorne asks what happens when a people try to establish theocracy, enforcing Old Testament law in Old Testament ways. Would such faith transform the community and its members, or deform it and them? Hawthorne critiques the Puritans on the grounds of their own theology: those who condemn never fully recognize their own fallen condition. We always sabotage our own best intentions, Hawthorne implies, and never so much as when those intentions are rooted in dogmatism driven by fanaticism.

What does this have to do with Updike, born three generations after Hawthorne, and exploring themes that on the surface seem a thousand generations removed from him? Simply this: Updike answers the flip side of Hawthorne's questions. Updike sets most of his novels in a contemporary American culture that has thrown off its Puritanism with a vengeance (though a residue remains). His characters inhabit a world with at most a saccharine coating of Christian faith and deeply eroded ethics.

If Hawthorne portrayed a world in which Christianity had become rigid and tyrannical, Updike portrays one in which it has shriveled to slogans and sentimentality. And do people in his world fare better?

No.

Hawthorne's protagonists seem fallen from a great height. They are tragic figures. Updike's characters seem merely stumble-prone, tangled up in their own feet, aimless and bored. They are quietly, subtly, pathetic.

If we stop believing in God, are we free or ensnared? Do we become more courageous, or more anxious and timid? Do we become rulers of our own destiny, or victims of our own boredom and wantonness? Do we slip the burden of guilt, or become consumed by it, unrelieved by grace?

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July 2003, Vol. 47, No. 7