![]() ![]() Indeed, Moravia’s stylish and subtle novel arrives by chance as an edifying complement to Roger’s Version, a finely-ground lens through which to view aspects of Updike’s turbid and murky text. This is a theory which John Updike’s new book does little to falsify. Among its many observations on this subject, The Voyeur advances a theory that voyeurism – expressed through the fictional representation of private matters, like sexual intercourse – is a major source of inspiration for Western literature. Van Horne’s moony and Verna’s flash would interest Alberto Moravia, whose latest novel, The Voyeur, is much concerned with sexual exhibitionism and the relations – necessary and interchangeable – between exhibitionist and voyeur. She is standing only a few inches from where her uncle, Roger Lambert, is sitting, so that when she lifts her skirt above her un-underpanted thighs, he finds himself face to face with ‘her pubic bush’, which he describes as ‘broad, like her face’, and, a moment later, as ‘a sea urchin on the white ocean floor’. ![]() Now it is a young woman – Verna Ekelof – who exposes herself. In Roger’s Version the roles are reversed. Readers of John Updike’s previous novel, The Witches of Eastwick, will not have forgotten Darryl Van Horne’s bottom: how, at the end of a game of tennis, Darryl dropped his shorts and thrust his hairy rump into his partner’s face, demanding that she kiss it, which she did. ![]()
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