Jastrow. Don't tell me Updike's taken the *science* seriously. But he has--he's not the man to deny the devil his due, especially after writing _Witches of Eastwick_, which would have been called a fantasy novel if it had been written badly by a nobody.

But enough of this high-flown abstraction--let's get to grips with the book. There's these two guys, see. There's Roger Lambert, a middle-aged professor of theology, a white-wine-sipping adultery-contemplating intellectual New Englander who probably isn't eighty light-years removed from John Updike. Roger's a nasty piece of business, mostly, lecherous, dishonest and petty-minded, and obsessed with a kind of free-floating Hawthornian Protestant guilt that has been passed down for twenty generations up Boston way and hasn't gotten a bit more specific in the meantime.

And then there's Roger Lambert's antagonist, Dale Kohler. Dale's a young computer hacker with pimples and an obnoxious cocksure attitude. If Dale were just a little more hip about it, he'd be a cyberpunk, but for thematic reasons Updike chose to make Dale a born-again Christian. We never really believe this, though, because Dale almost never talks Jesus. He talks AND-OR circuits, and megabytes, and Mandelbrot sets, with all the techspeak fluency Updike can manage, which is considerable. Dale talks God on a microchip, technological transcendence, and he was last seen in Greg Bear's _Blood Music_ where his name was different but his motive and character were identical. Dale is a type. Not just a science fictional type, but the type that *creates* science fiction, who talks God for the same reason Philip K. Dick talked God. Because it comes with the territory.

Oh yeah, and then we've got some women. They don't amount to much. They're not people, exactly. They're temptresses and symbols.

There's Roger Lambert's wife, Esther, for instance. Esther ends up teaching Dale Kohler the