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Toward the End of Time
Ben Turnbull, the hero of John Updike’s eighteenth novel, is a sixty-six-year-old retired investment counselor living north of Boston in the year 2020. A recent war between the United States and China has thinned the population and brought social chaos. The dollar has been locally replaced by Massachusetts scrip; instead of taxes, one pays protection money to competing racketeers. Nevertheless, Ben’s life, traced by his journal entries over the course of a year, retains many of its accustomed comforts, as supervised by his vibrant wife, Gloria. He plays golf; he pays visits to his five children and ten grandchildren. Something of a science buff, he finds his personal history caught up in the disjunctions and vagaries of the “many-worlds” hypothesis derived from the indeterminacy of quantum theory. His identity branches into variants extending back through history and ahead in the evolution of the universe, as both it and his own mortal, nature-enshrouded existence move toward the end of time.
334 pages, Hardcover
First published January 1, 1997
70 people are currently reading
933 people want to read
About the author
John Updike
869 books2,450 followersJohn Hoyer Updike was an American writer. Updike's most famous work is his Rabbit series (Rabbit, Run; Rabbit Redux; Rabbit Is Rich; Rabbit At Rest; and Rabbit Remembered). Rabbit is Rich and Rabbit at Rest both won Pulitzer Prizes for Updike. Describing his subject as "the American small town, Protestant middle class," Updike is well known for his careful craftsmanship and prolific writing, having published 22 novels and more than a dozen short story collections as well as poetry, literary criticism and children's books. Hundreds of his stories, reviews, and poems have appeared in The New Yorker since the 1950s. His works often explore sex, faith, and death, and their inter-relationships.
He died of lung cancer at age 76.
He died of lung cancer at age 76.
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Displaying 1 - 30 of 135 reviews
July 5, 2024
To say this book attracted critical attention is putting it mildly. Surely, readers should not have been surprised. From the little I have read of Updike, there seems to be some common ingredients in his work. Such as an odious male protagonist, self-absorbed, sex obsessed with a dim view of women, and the world. Marriage and adultery also seem to be ever present in his work, some religion is thrown in too.
"……ferocious female nagging is the price men pay for our much-lamented prerogatives, the power and the mobility and the penis"
Sixty six year old Ben is our man, it’s 2020 and post WWIII – a nuclear war between the USA and China. This trifling matter is hardly explored by Updike. Sure, there are consequences from the war, such as – the collapse of the central government in the US, little or no public services, no taxes a shattered police force for example. But the purpose of this plotless story quickly becomes apparent. It’s about Ben’s musings about his life, his observations of what’s happening around him, and his meditations about scientific matters – such as spacetime, the end of the universe and much more.
There were times I questioned Ben’s sanity. For example, at one stage he wondered if he killed his second wife, due to her absence – you would be forgiven for thinking, he should know. He has an affair with a live-in prostitute, he even has intimate encounters with a fourteen-year-old girl. This, from a grandfather of eleven.
The book has a certain rhythm I found comforting. Each section commences with Ben’s highly detailed observations of his wife’s garden. I usually don’t like such things (gardening and over-detailed descriptions), but I was transfixed. It must be Updike’s writing. The garden descriptions were usually followed by his activities for the day, such as paying protection money to dodgy dudes, playing golf with mates, examining the thread of his underwear, looking at, and describing his erect penis and the like. The end of each section usually involved his detailed thoughts about scientific matters – such as the universe, quantum physics and time. I found this interesting.
I loved this. I’m not a fan of Ben, his faults are abundant. His thoughts are sometimes incoherent. However, can you imagine if our thoughts over one day were to be recorded? I would imagine, they would be equally ‘all over the shop.’ I know mine would be – would yours?
Prostate cancer makes a guest appearance. Updike nailed the details about the treatment and sequalae of this disease, particularly the impotence, incontinence, and long-term fatigue. Take it from me it was accurate. I wonder if Updike was a PCa brother?
There is a scene where a doe was shot by a professional hunter’s arrow. All because the poor animal was nibbling the plants in Ben’s wife’s garden. It was abjectly heartbreaking and really hit me hard.
"She bedded down and gave me this one long look like I was coming to her assistance, and then lay down her pretty little head on the leaves. I didn’t have to use a second arrow"
Updike really describes the seedier side of the male psyche very well indeed.
I don’t know what I’ve just experienced.
Updike was a star.
5 Stars
"……ferocious female nagging is the price men pay for our much-lamented prerogatives, the power and the mobility and the penis"
Sixty six year old Ben is our man, it’s 2020 and post WWIII – a nuclear war between the USA and China. This trifling matter is hardly explored by Updike. Sure, there are consequences from the war, such as – the collapse of the central government in the US, little or no public services, no taxes a shattered police force for example. But the purpose of this plotless story quickly becomes apparent. It’s about Ben’s musings about his life, his observations of what’s happening around him, and his meditations about scientific matters – such as spacetime, the end of the universe and much more.
There were times I questioned Ben’s sanity. For example, at one stage he wondered if he killed his second wife, due to her absence – you would be forgiven for thinking, he should know. He has an affair with a live-in prostitute, he even has intimate encounters with a fourteen-year-old girl. This, from a grandfather of eleven.
The book has a certain rhythm I found comforting. Each section commences with Ben’s highly detailed observations of his wife’s garden. I usually don’t like such things (gardening and over-detailed descriptions), but I was transfixed. It must be Updike’s writing. The garden descriptions were usually followed by his activities for the day, such as paying protection money to dodgy dudes, playing golf with mates, examining the thread of his underwear, looking at, and describing his erect penis and the like. The end of each section usually involved his detailed thoughts about scientific matters – such as the universe, quantum physics and time. I found this interesting.
I loved this. I’m not a fan of Ben, his faults are abundant. His thoughts are sometimes incoherent. However, can you imagine if our thoughts over one day were to be recorded? I would imagine, they would be equally ‘all over the shop.’ I know mine would be – would yours?
Prostate cancer makes a guest appearance. Updike nailed the details about the treatment and sequalae of this disease, particularly the impotence, incontinence, and long-term fatigue. Take it from me it was accurate. I wonder if Updike was a PCa brother?
There is a scene where a doe was shot by a professional hunter’s arrow. All because the poor animal was nibbling the plants in Ben’s wife’s garden. It was abjectly heartbreaking and really hit me hard.
"She bedded down and gave me this one long look like I was coming to her assistance, and then lay down her pretty little head on the leaves. I didn’t have to use a second arrow"
Updike really describes the seedier side of the male psyche very well indeed.
I don’t know what I’ve just experienced.
Updike was a star.
5 Stars
December 16, 2019
This book was written in 1999. I read it in 2000. It was still over a year away from 9/11. I think everyone and their uncle was writing books around Y2K. Everyone was frightened of the future, unsure of what the new century would bring. Updike's vision of the future almost seems tame; his cynicism almost seems light-hearted now. We didn't have a fucking clue about what lurked around the corner...
John Updike is a writer of immense beauty, I'll give him that. He's also a bit of a snobbish asshole. I recall one famous interview in which he talked shit about genre fiction and extolled the merits of "literary fiction". I could honestly care less that Updike had little respect for genre fiction---anyone who's read an Updike novel can pretty much deduce that---but then to have the gall to write and publish a science fiction novel (albeit a "literary novel" with science fiction elements), and a crappy one at that, is pretty hypocritical and obnoxious.
"Towards the End of Time" takes place in a future after a huge global war with China has left America a big mess. Granted, people still shop at grocery stores, mail still gets delivered, and the suburbs still exist, but everything sucks. Half the world population is dead, the governments are a joke (not much different than today, sadly), and gas prices are, of course, astronomical.
The protagonist in the story is an old man. I couldn't tell you what the plot was because I don't think there actually was one. (If you want to read an excellent scathing review of this book, read David Foster Wallace's wonderful book of essays, "Consider the Lobster". He has a book review of this included in that.)
I have great respect for Updike as a writer---he was one of the writers who inspired me to become a writer myself---but even great writers occasionally write shitty books, and this one was his.
John Updike is a writer of immense beauty, I'll give him that. He's also a bit of a snobbish asshole. I recall one famous interview in which he talked shit about genre fiction and extolled the merits of "literary fiction". I could honestly care less that Updike had little respect for genre fiction---anyone who's read an Updike novel can pretty much deduce that---but then to have the gall to write and publish a science fiction novel (albeit a "literary novel" with science fiction elements), and a crappy one at that, is pretty hypocritical and obnoxious.
"Towards the End of Time" takes place in a future after a huge global war with China has left America a big mess. Granted, people still shop at grocery stores, mail still gets delivered, and the suburbs still exist, but everything sucks. Half the world population is dead, the governments are a joke (not much different than today, sadly), and gas prices are, of course, astronomical.
The protagonist in the story is an old man. I couldn't tell you what the plot was because I don't think there actually was one. (If you want to read an excellent scathing review of this book, read David Foster Wallace's wonderful book of essays, "Consider the Lobster". He has a book review of this included in that.)
I have great respect for Updike as a writer---he was one of the writers who inspired me to become a writer myself---but even great writers occasionally write shitty books, and this one was his.
August 13, 2016
3.5 stars.
There's a lot to admire about Updike's prose and I particularly like the setting of a post-apocalyptic world adjusting to the fallout of a recent US-Sino war.
Ben Turnbull is a complex character. he has a complex relationship with his wife Gloria and he has an equally complex relationship with Diedre and the people at the bottom of his garden.
However, there are simply too many disjointed reflections and introspections about man's place in the cosmos, the meaning of life, illness and death.
Good but not great.
There's a lot to admire about Updike's prose and I particularly like the setting of a post-apocalyptic world adjusting to the fallout of a recent US-Sino war.
Ben Turnbull is a complex character. he has a complex relationship with his wife Gloria and he has an equally complex relationship with Diedre and the people at the bottom of his garden.
However, there are simply too many disjointed reflections and introspections about man's place in the cosmos, the meaning of life, illness and death.
Good but not great.
May 13, 2020
That’s it for me and John Updike. I thought The Witches of Eastwick was bad, but this...
March 15, 2023
If you told me that literary legend Updike wrote a dystopian novel, I wouldn't have believed you because surely I would have heard of it by now. Especially if it was a 'quiet' depiction of an unhappy future, which I gravitate to much more than the war-infused or zombie versions of the genre. However, after reading it I can understand exactly why it remains in the shadows of Updike's career and the entire genre. There just isn't anything good or noteworthy about it at all. Large parts of it felt like a writer trying to produce words without anything to say.
Cormac McCarthy's The Road is still the clear winner in the literary version of the apocalypse and Paul Auster's In the Country of Last Things is still the clear winner in literary dystopia. Updike's novel isn't even worth an honorable mention.
Cormac McCarthy's The Road is still the clear winner in the literary version of the apocalypse and Paul Auster's In the Country of Last Things is still the clear winner in literary dystopia. Updike's novel isn't even worth an honorable mention.
July 23, 2020
How do you prefer your literary sex scenes? 19th century: all suggestion - words and phrases like "prolonged gaze, unchaperoned, hidden copse, straightening clothing, flushed countenance, besmirched reputation"? Romance novel: focused on thoughts, heavy breathing, items of clothing coming off, sensations, fireworks images? Post-modern: detailed, unhurried, slang anatomic terms, dirty talk, position changes, lively post-coital banter? John Updike's sex scenes are different still - his are hyper-anatomic, with descriptions of minute physical details that can become repulsive. TMI!, we might say. I'm not sure why he likes doing that, but it's been a characteristic of his writing for 50 years. I'm hardly a prude, but the sex in his novels comes across differently than it did when he was a younger man and when his protagonists tended to be younger, too. I know it's the way of men, even old men, but when the narrator ogles nurses, office assistants and even his daughter-in-law, and has sexual encounters with a young teenage girl in the woods, it is uncomfortable. Does he want it to be?
Updike wrote "Toward the End of Time" in 1997, when he was 65. Its protagonist and narrator, Ben is 66. He is a remarried and retired financial consultant living on Cape Ann, Massachusetts in the year 2020 - coincidence that I picked the book up to read now. Less than ten years earlier, there was a global nuclear war, primarily involving the U. S. and China, and large areas of our country are desolate wastes. There is no federal government. (I hear cheering somewhere - stop that!). Strangely, Ben does not talk or think explicitly about the war, we just pick up bits and pieces of the puzzle as we go along. The economy has collapsed. The area of the Great Plains is a "radioactive dustbowl". The ocean's fish populations are in trouble. Mexico has reclaimed the Southwest, and Americans are going into Mexico, which is considering building a wall!
Primarily, the story is a journal of Ben's year, from Spring through Fall. I've noticed that the changing seasons hold a continuing fascination for Updike. A number of odd things are happening, related to the literal disintegration of society after the war. Also, the structure of the novel is likewise discombobulated by sudden interpositions of history into the narrative. These include tomb robbers in ancient Egypt, the first century travels of the apostle Paul in Asia Minor, Ireland being invaded by Vikings during the Dark Ages, and a World War II concentration camp in Poland. They float among the stream of events, out of place in time and location - perhaps that is Updike's way of representing the tears in the fabric of Ben's life that are occurring. I found these outtakes poetic, but difficult to assimilate, and unwelcome distractions from the story. In addition, Ben's wife Gloria is suddenly gone from the house, for about a month, and he doesn't know or particularly care where she is. Huh?
Overall though, I am always blessed to listen to Updike's mind work. His writing is always special. One can't help being thoroughly impressed with his intelligence and curiosity about how the world works - there's hardly a science he doesn't touch on. In "Toward the End of Time" he spends a fair amount of energy discussing both subatomic- and astrophysics, and the nature of time itself, especially that time isn't necessarily linear in the way we think it must be - this is not your average beach read. And, as usual, his main character shares his thoughts on faith and God with us. Mixed in with teasing about our silly beliefs there is a sense of awe there, too. Of course Updike is most interested in how people think and act - that's what gives his books their weight.
I liked the Miami Herald's comment on the back cover: "A book aimed not to resolve but to arouse a reader's wonder. Vintage Updike: marital angst worked out against the chilly backdrop of privilege, rendered with a lyricism and insight and eye for detail reminiscent of the work of Jane Austen."
The book contains plenty of references to the themes and settings of his earlier books, and although he continued to write after this novel, it felt at times as if Updike intended it as a sort of magnum opus. In the small scale of sentences and paragraphs his writing here is as good as ever. But when taken as a whole, the novel, with its odd diversions, seems less like a unified whole, and more like a jar of pretty marbles. In the final section of the book, Ben is dealing with a health scare and understandably becomes preoccupied with death. But then in the final pages, regardless of his unknown prognosis, his attentions return to all of the glorious life around him - a most optimistic Updike ending.
Updike wrote "Toward the End of Time" in 1997, when he was 65. Its protagonist and narrator, Ben is 66. He is a remarried and retired financial consultant living on Cape Ann, Massachusetts in the year 2020 - coincidence that I picked the book up to read now. Less than ten years earlier, there was a global nuclear war, primarily involving the U. S. and China, and large areas of our country are desolate wastes. There is no federal government. (I hear cheering somewhere - stop that!). Strangely, Ben does not talk or think explicitly about the war, we just pick up bits and pieces of the puzzle as we go along. The economy has collapsed. The area of the Great Plains is a "radioactive dustbowl". The ocean's fish populations are in trouble. Mexico has reclaimed the Southwest, and Americans are going into Mexico, which is considering building a wall!
Primarily, the story is a journal of Ben's year, from Spring through Fall. I've noticed that the changing seasons hold a continuing fascination for Updike. A number of odd things are happening, related to the literal disintegration of society after the war. Also, the structure of the novel is likewise discombobulated by sudden interpositions of history into the narrative. These include tomb robbers in ancient Egypt, the first century travels of the apostle Paul in Asia Minor, Ireland being invaded by Vikings during the Dark Ages, and a World War II concentration camp in Poland. They float among the stream of events, out of place in time and location - perhaps that is Updike's way of representing the tears in the fabric of Ben's life that are occurring. I found these outtakes poetic, but difficult to assimilate, and unwelcome distractions from the story. In addition, Ben's wife Gloria is suddenly gone from the house, for about a month, and he doesn't know or particularly care where she is. Huh?
Overall though, I am always blessed to listen to Updike's mind work. His writing is always special. One can't help being thoroughly impressed with his intelligence and curiosity about how the world works - there's hardly a science he doesn't touch on. In "Toward the End of Time" he spends a fair amount of energy discussing both subatomic- and astrophysics, and the nature of time itself, especially that time isn't necessarily linear in the way we think it must be - this is not your average beach read. And, as usual, his main character shares his thoughts on faith and God with us. Mixed in with teasing about our silly beliefs there is a sense of awe there, too. Of course Updike is most interested in how people think and act - that's what gives his books their weight.
I liked the Miami Herald's comment on the back cover: "A book aimed not to resolve but to arouse a reader's wonder. Vintage Updike: marital angst worked out against the chilly backdrop of privilege, rendered with a lyricism and insight and eye for detail reminiscent of the work of Jane Austen."
The book contains plenty of references to the themes and settings of his earlier books, and although he continued to write after this novel, it felt at times as if Updike intended it as a sort of magnum opus. In the small scale of sentences and paragraphs his writing here is as good as ever. But when taken as a whole, the novel, with its odd diversions, seems less like a unified whole, and more like a jar of pretty marbles. In the final section of the book, Ben is dealing with a health scare and understandably becomes preoccupied with death. But then in the final pages, regardless of his unknown prognosis, his attentions return to all of the glorious life around him - a most optimistic Updike ending.
October 27, 2014
Updike manages an amazing range of moods with his usual grace and dexterity, though this is not a novel for the faint hearted or those who are dictionary deprived. Age, time, the power struggles between the sexes are gloriously answered within the waxing and waning of the seasons as nature moves through its own cycle and place in time. Metaphors are brilliantly used and is par for the course as far as Updike is concerned. Note the uncanny use of the deer as she slyly turns into a brilliant young whore which Turnbull, the main character, uses to his own advantage. Here we find the ultrarealism of the hell that we call our daily existence as well as the quintessence of mortality. Updike's wit is applied to a wide range of topics, from flowers, animals, grandchildren, corpses, copulations; ancient Egypt and plastic peanuts; memory, disgust, dread, lust and spiritual rapture. Life encapsulated within 334 pages of devastating literature.
August 26, 2020
Toward the End of Time is a novel John Updike wrote in 1997 forecasting what life in the U.S. would be like in 2020. Well, now it is 2020, so I thought the book would be worth reading. It definitely was, though with qualifications.
Updike's U.S. in 2020 has just gone through a war with China that China apparently won, while losing many more millions of citizens. For its part, the U.S. is no longer a functioning country. States (in this case Massachusetts) are on their own, issuing their own currency and relying on FedEx to provide not only mail service but security services. Our protagonist, Ben, 67, is a retired financial executive living on the Massachusetts coast with his second wife in her family house. He is beset with the problem of stray kids intruding on his property along with deer that eat his wife's flowers. He has accessible grandchildren who make little sense to him. And he decides the best thing to do is keep a journal--not dated, but regular--about the incidents of his life.
This novel consists of three dimensions. The first is Ben and his activities, sometimes imagined. The second is the dystopian surrounding. The third is the cycle of nature, ranging from flowers to cosmic birth and death.
Updike gives Ben a range of sexual opportunities, some successful, others not, and leads him into a prostate operation that impairs his ability to keep his wife interested. To the contrary, he perceives her becoming quite nice to him, expecting that he will die soon enough, and looking forward to her life in her 70s not encumbered with the nuisance of a man in the house.
Updike also uses the wife to stir up potential rivals who emerge from the rubble of war. These are slim pickings, to be sure, but in general life itself has become slim pickings.
As for nature, Updike indulges in extraordinary descriptions of Ben's wife's garden, naming every conceivable flower and its appearance, and tying these plants to the passage of time from spring to the following winter. He then goes on to meditating on the sky, the galaxy, and so forth, displaying considerable erudition...erudition that effectively cancels out the importance of life on earth. I have misgivings about this aspect of the book since it goes on too long, just as Melville's cetology in Moby-Dick goes on too long.
If we need to read about flowers, I would prefer doing so as Lawrence dealt with them in Sons and Lovers or in some of the novels of Wallace Stegner. In other words, let's weave them into the narrative flow a bit better with finer counterpoints to the main character's psychology.
For vivid prose, however, bearing garlands of facts and human insight, Updike displays his customary mastery. At one point he drops into the persona of a monk on the Skellig islands--don't ask me to explain how this happens--in the early middle ages. At another point he is tussling with Saints Peter and Paul. This is impressive writing. When critics and commentators focus on Updike's "style," they seem to focus on the energies of the language, but I don't think language is necessarily the secret ingredient. More to the point, Updike wrote out of an abundance of sheer knowledge. This can break language's bonds and make it much more compelling than mere matters of rare vocabulary, artful syntax, and even lively rhythm. He was (sadly he's gone) a very intelligent, intellectually curious man.
Well, Toward the End of Time was never going to end well, was it? Read it if you are interested in how dystopia can be concentrated in the life of a single 67-year-old man.
Updike's U.S. in 2020 has just gone through a war with China that China apparently won, while losing many more millions of citizens. For its part, the U.S. is no longer a functioning country. States (in this case Massachusetts) are on their own, issuing their own currency and relying on FedEx to provide not only mail service but security services. Our protagonist, Ben, 67, is a retired financial executive living on the Massachusetts coast with his second wife in her family house. He is beset with the problem of stray kids intruding on his property along with deer that eat his wife's flowers. He has accessible grandchildren who make little sense to him. And he decides the best thing to do is keep a journal--not dated, but regular--about the incidents of his life.
This novel consists of three dimensions. The first is Ben and his activities, sometimes imagined. The second is the dystopian surrounding. The third is the cycle of nature, ranging from flowers to cosmic birth and death.
Updike gives Ben a range of sexual opportunities, some successful, others not, and leads him into a prostate operation that impairs his ability to keep his wife interested. To the contrary, he perceives her becoming quite nice to him, expecting that he will die soon enough, and looking forward to her life in her 70s not encumbered with the nuisance of a man in the house.
Updike also uses the wife to stir up potential rivals who emerge from the rubble of war. These are slim pickings, to be sure, but in general life itself has become slim pickings.
As for nature, Updike indulges in extraordinary descriptions of Ben's wife's garden, naming every conceivable flower and its appearance, and tying these plants to the passage of time from spring to the following winter. He then goes on to meditating on the sky, the galaxy, and so forth, displaying considerable erudition...erudition that effectively cancels out the importance of life on earth. I have misgivings about this aspect of the book since it goes on too long, just as Melville's cetology in Moby-Dick goes on too long.
If we need to read about flowers, I would prefer doing so as Lawrence dealt with them in Sons and Lovers or in some of the novels of Wallace Stegner. In other words, let's weave them into the narrative flow a bit better with finer counterpoints to the main character's psychology.
For vivid prose, however, bearing garlands of facts and human insight, Updike displays his customary mastery. At one point he drops into the persona of a monk on the Skellig islands--don't ask me to explain how this happens--in the early middle ages. At another point he is tussling with Saints Peter and Paul. This is impressive writing. When critics and commentators focus on Updike's "style," they seem to focus on the energies of the language, but I don't think language is necessarily the secret ingredient. More to the point, Updike wrote out of an abundance of sheer knowledge. This can break language's bonds and make it much more compelling than mere matters of rare vocabulary, artful syntax, and even lively rhythm. He was (sadly he's gone) a very intelligent, intellectually curious man.
Well, Toward the End of Time was never going to end well, was it? Read it if you are interested in how dystopia can be concentrated in the life of a single 67-year-old man.
November 22, 2011
(1.5 stars)
Only the most stalwart of Updike fans (and for the most part I consider myself one) would find much of value in "Toward the End of Time". Its half-baked musings on mortality, our place in the cosmos, and post-apocalyptic life is a really tough (and, often, creepy) tour of Updike's brain.
A good chunk of Updike's near-50 books invoke similar themes, with a schlubby, misogynistic, nearly unlikable protagonist/anti-hero coping with issues of aging, occupational success/failure and a hyperactive libido. Rabbit Angstrom, from Updike's twice-Pulitzer-acknowledged Rabbit series, is the template from which Updike has cut each of his successive grumpy-grousers. Where Rabbit was though, in his days of conception, a marginally sympathetic character, Updike's successive creations just slightly tweak the Rabbit character; their similarity can only lead the reader to think they're semi-autobiographical caricatures of Updike's own life. This is particularly problematic with Ben Turnbull, protagonist of "Toward the End of Time", and arguably Updike's creepiest concoction.
The premise of this seemed somewhat promising: Ben Turnbull is a 67 year-old retired investment advisor in the year 2020, ten years after the Sino-American conflict which destroyed a huge chunk of the US (a plot point that is woefully underexplained, and seems only to set up a hare-brained sexual fantasy). He had five kids with his first wife (and ten grandkids), and is married to a woman he thinks is trying to kill him. He (predictably) grouses about his sex life, and regularly pays for a prostitute. Despite his rather mundane life, he has no problems throwing around nearly every phylum and genus of every shred of flora and biota on his ocean-front Massachusetts property, and has no problems dropping any and every 50-cent adjective the English language has ever invented ("chthonous"? "opisthognothous"? "steatopygous"? Really, John...you expect us to believe Ben isn't you?!?!). He evidently suffers from dementia or Altzheimer's, too, because he'll (a propos of nothing) break into first-person flights of fancy, being present around the days of Jesus' crucifixion, there when Egyptian tombs robbed of their booty, present as a Nazi guard in a concentration camp, and HOLY CRAP did Ben just fantasize about auto-fellating himself? and GOOD GAWD he didn't just try to have sex with that 13-year-old??
There are smatterings of caustic wit present that remind us that, indeed, John Updike was one great American writer. The aftertaste of some of the skeezy images he leaves us with in this novel, though, are best left in the unread pile, and call for a re-read of the Rabbit series to floss this pseudo-intellectual hoo-ha from the memory banks.
Only the most stalwart of Updike fans (and for the most part I consider myself one) would find much of value in "Toward the End of Time". Its half-baked musings on mortality, our place in the cosmos, and post-apocalyptic life is a really tough (and, often, creepy) tour of Updike's brain.
A good chunk of Updike's near-50 books invoke similar themes, with a schlubby, misogynistic, nearly unlikable protagonist/anti-hero coping with issues of aging, occupational success/failure and a hyperactive libido. Rabbit Angstrom, from Updike's twice-Pulitzer-acknowledged Rabbit series, is the template from which Updike has cut each of his successive grumpy-grousers. Where Rabbit was though, in his days of conception, a marginally sympathetic character, Updike's successive creations just slightly tweak the Rabbit character; their similarity can only lead the reader to think they're semi-autobiographical caricatures of Updike's own life. This is particularly problematic with Ben Turnbull, protagonist of "Toward the End of Time", and arguably Updike's creepiest concoction.
The premise of this seemed somewhat promising: Ben Turnbull is a 67 year-old retired investment advisor in the year 2020, ten years after the Sino-American conflict which destroyed a huge chunk of the US (a plot point that is woefully underexplained, and seems only to set up a hare-brained sexual fantasy). He had five kids with his first wife (and ten grandkids), and is married to a woman he thinks is trying to kill him. He (predictably) grouses about his sex life, and regularly pays for a prostitute. Despite his rather mundane life, he has no problems throwing around nearly every phylum and genus of every shred of flora and biota on his ocean-front Massachusetts property, and has no problems dropping any and every 50-cent adjective the English language has ever invented ("chthonous"? "opisthognothous"? "steatopygous"? Really, John...you expect us to believe Ben isn't you?!?!). He evidently suffers from dementia or Altzheimer's, too, because he'll (a propos of nothing) break into first-person flights of fancy, being present around the days of Jesus' crucifixion, there when Egyptian tombs robbed of their booty, present as a Nazi guard in a concentration camp, and HOLY CRAP did Ben just fantasize about auto-fellating himself? and GOOD GAWD he didn't just try to have sex with that 13-year-old??
There are smatterings of caustic wit present that remind us that, indeed, John Updike was one great American writer. The aftertaste of some of the skeezy images he leaves us with in this novel, though, are best left in the unread pile, and call for a re-read of the Rabbit series to floss this pseudo-intellectual hoo-ha from the memory banks.
March 10, 2024
I am by no means a prude, but this book was truly vile. I got about 25 pages in before I decided I needed to look this book up to see if anyone hated it as much as I did. The author should have kept this filth in his diary. I can’t believe someone would publish these thoughts and show the world. The whole book is about a dirty old man who loves young girls. He has a fetish for black women and women who look “prepubescent”. Yuck!! I need to go bleach my eyeballs now. The author of this book needs therapy or jail.
February 15, 2012
The recipe for Updike's "Toward the End of Time" could be appropriated as thus: one tablespoon of Philip Roth (I'm thinking of his "Portnoy's Complaint"), one tablespoon of Norman Mailer, one teaspoon of McCarthy's "The Road" and a pinch of Vonnegut's "Slaughterhouse-Five" and Paul Harding's "Tinkers". Clearly, since "Time" precedes several of these works, I'm not implying they had a direct influence on Updike. Rather I'm trying to characterize the ingredients of my experience reading this book, and I think that's arguably an accurate portrait.
The strange thing about this novel is that I like some things about it and I didn't like other things, and more often than not, those things overlap. Some days I liked them, other days not. The idea of essentially doing a literary dress-up of science fiction is intriguing, filtering an international apocalypse, quantum mechanics, mysterious spaceships and mutant life-forms through the perspective of an aging libidinous death-doting curmudgeon (because let's face it, such people are so often the protagonistic focus of New Yorker-style literary fiction). But as other reviewers have pointed out, such disparate elements don't really cohere into a satisfactory whole.
Especially incongruous, at least to me, are the sexual asides. I wasn't at all offended by them; rather I found them funny, if somewhat disjointedly out of place. Once I finished the book, I could in retrospect see what he was (maybe) intending with it (the "End of Time" referring to the end of history and to that of Ben's personal time, so identified with sex and the need to procreate), but the porn-like passages and the special historical trips to biblical periods or Nazi Germany and the golfing and the Chinese War all kept clanging into one another and never meshing.
The prose is wonderfully crafted, very supple, very rich, and very evocative. However, I think one of the novel's problems might have been solved had Updike chosen third-person limited and not first-person. For one, such eloquence is difficult to believe coming from the protagonist, given his overall maturity and life spent in finance. The well-crafted narrative creates a disjunct between the character and the reader. I'm not believing these are Ben's words. They're Updike's, hardly veiled as Ben's. If authors want to run wild with floral prose, they either need to make their first-person narrators believably capable of such eloquence (writer, critic, scholar, etc.) or simplify and tell the story third-person.
The strange thing about this novel is that I like some things about it and I didn't like other things, and more often than not, those things overlap. Some days I liked them, other days not. The idea of essentially doing a literary dress-up of science fiction is intriguing, filtering an international apocalypse, quantum mechanics, mysterious spaceships and mutant life-forms through the perspective of an aging libidinous death-doting curmudgeon (because let's face it, such people are so often the protagonistic focus of New Yorker-style literary fiction). But as other reviewers have pointed out, such disparate elements don't really cohere into a satisfactory whole.
Especially incongruous, at least to me, are the sexual asides. I wasn't at all offended by them; rather I found them funny, if somewhat disjointedly out of place. Once I finished the book, I could in retrospect see what he was (maybe) intending with it (the "End of Time" referring to the end of history and to that of Ben's personal time, so identified with sex and the need to procreate), but the porn-like passages and the special historical trips to biblical periods or Nazi Germany and the golfing and the Chinese War all kept clanging into one another and never meshing.
The prose is wonderfully crafted, very supple, very rich, and very evocative. However, I think one of the novel's problems might have been solved had Updike chosen third-person limited and not first-person. For one, such eloquence is difficult to believe coming from the protagonist, given his overall maturity and life spent in finance. The well-crafted narrative creates a disjunct between the character and the reader. I'm not believing these are Ben's words. They're Updike's, hardly veiled as Ben's. If authors want to run wild with floral prose, they either need to make their first-person narrators believably capable of such eloquence (writer, critic, scholar, etc.) or simplify and tell the story third-person.
June 8, 2018
Reading this book is like listening to your elderly neighbor tell you in detail about every piece of laundry she washed this morning, except with a large dose of old man ego that insists that his concerns are so much more important than yours could ever be.
November 18, 2023
John Updike has been a hit and miss writer for me. He has written some excellent books but also some not so good ones. However, this has got to be one of the worst books I've ever read. It takes place in, what at the time the book was written, the near future 2020, just after China and the US have had a nuclear war that has killed off a huge part of the population. But the only way the reader will know this is that it is mentioned occasionally in the story. The story, otherwise, seems to be set in normal times. The story follows Ben Turnbull who is sixty-six and is married to Gloria . They have a somewhat strange relationship and she disappears for a period while he has an affair with a woman named Deirdre but Gloria then returns after Deirdre tires of Ben. There are several other very strange parts of the book that didn't make sense to me but maybe Updike was trying to some kind of point that I didn't pick up on. Anyway, by the mid part of the book I really didn't care, I just wanted to get this read over with.
January 21, 2025
No conecte con el personaje, se me hizo una visión muy machista y hasta cierto punto misógina; si esa es la expectativa del hombre para terminar sus días no solo me resulta triste sino también patética.
I didn't connect with the character, it seemed to me to be a very sexist and to a certain extent misogynistic vision; If that is man's expectation to end his days, it is not only sad to me but also pathetic.
I didn't connect with the character, it seemed to me to be a very sexist and to a certain extent misogynistic vision; If that is man's expectation to end his days, it is not only sad to me but also pathetic.
Read
August 24, 2023David Foster Wallace's review of this book seemed to do permanent damage to Updike's literary reputation. I read it hoping to develop a contrarian opinion, but alas it honestly isn't very good.
June 8, 2015
June 8 2015, Update: 186. That is the page I got to when I gave up. Why, you ask? Because that is the page on which the protagonist describes his fantasy of giving himself a blowjob, describing the different fluids involved. Disgusted, I decided it was not worth reading through this to see what the point of this book is (my guess is there is no point anyway). Updike, you are entitled to your fantasies. Truly. Maybe they are even very common among men. I have no idea. I just don't want to read about every single one of them, even if they are placed between lines of well written descriptions of pastoral scenery and mundane human interactions. Not for me, thank you very much.
June 7 2015
Still struggling to finish this one, but my impression after reading about half of it are that Updike knows how to write, but the contents themselves are unclear and uninteresting. I don't say this only because seems to be no point to the endless-albeit skillful-spinning of words, but also because it seems like there is never going to be a point, unless that point is the author feeling clever. The characters are, as many pointed out, not quite interesting, their lives full of small events that might not be worth writing about, and the sudden skips between realities / dreams / imagined events don't seem to lead anywhere. I do hope my mind will be changed before I give up on this book, but for now, I am not a fan!
June 7 2015
Still struggling to finish this one, but my impression after reading about half of it are that Updike knows how to write, but the contents themselves are unclear and uninteresting. I don't say this only because seems to be no point to the endless-albeit skillful-spinning of words, but also because it seems like there is never going to be a point, unless that point is the author feeling clever. The characters are, as many pointed out, not quite interesting, their lives full of small events that might not be worth writing about, and the sudden skips between realities / dreams / imagined events don't seem to lead anywhere. I do hope my mind will be changed before I give up on this book, but for now, I am not a fan!
December 26, 2010
Didn't think I'd like Updike. This book proved me wrong.
The story is a mish-mash of science and philosophy with some very dark and scathing ideas about the human condition. Thus, I loved it!
here's a funny review that makes me like the book alot more since I dislike David Foster Wallace's review (from wikipedia):
In a review for the New York Observer entitled, "John Updike, Champion Literary Phallocrat, Drops One; Is This Finally the End for Magnificent Narcissists?" (later published in Consider the Lobster), novelist David Foster Wallace wrote a scathing critique of Toward the End of Time. Wallace wrote, "It is, of the total 25 Updike books I've read, far and away the worst, a novel so mind-bendingly clunky and self-indulgent that it's hard to believe the author let it be published in this kind of shape." Wallace quotes literary readers he knows who characterize Updike "just a penis with a thesaurus." Aside from its protagonist, who, Wallace argues, is fundamentally unlikable, the novel's prose is so turgid that is distracts "us with worries about whether Mr. Updike might be injured or ill." Wallace concludes: "Ben Turnbull's unhappiness is obvious right from the book's first page. But it never once occurs to him that the reason he's so unhappy is that he's an asshole."
The story is a mish-mash of science and philosophy with some very dark and scathing ideas about the human condition. Thus, I loved it!
here's a funny review that makes me like the book alot more since I dislike David Foster Wallace's review (from wikipedia):
In a review for the New York Observer entitled, "John Updike, Champion Literary Phallocrat, Drops One; Is This Finally the End for Magnificent Narcissists?" (later published in Consider the Lobster), novelist David Foster Wallace wrote a scathing critique of Toward the End of Time. Wallace wrote, "It is, of the total 25 Updike books I've read, far and away the worst, a novel so mind-bendingly clunky and self-indulgent that it's hard to believe the author let it be published in this kind of shape." Wallace quotes literary readers he knows who characterize Updike "just a penis with a thesaurus." Aside from its protagonist, who, Wallace argues, is fundamentally unlikable, the novel's prose is so turgid that is distracts "us with worries about whether Mr. Updike might be injured or ill." Wallace concludes: "Ben Turnbull's unhappiness is obvious right from the book's first page. But it never once occurs to him that the reason he's so unhappy is that he's an asshole."
May 12, 2009
As the first Updike book I have ever read, I was enamored with his poetic style, and his impressive respect for nature and science. I found him to be an amazing stylist with a talent for being able to decribe things in tremendous realistic detail. His writing read like poetry, but the side effect of this was that it was very dense and I was only able to read so much of it at a time. The plot was fairly uneventful: an older guy living in a broken down state of america contemplating on his past and whole concept of time. There were some cool antedotes about ancient egypt and cosmology, it was very scholarly in that sense: one of those books that went off on informative tangents and summoned my curiousity to areas outside of the story. It also took place in Massachusetts, and the descriptions conjured up great memories of growing up in that fine state. It wasn't the most uplifting of books. I would say the greatest takeaways would be his thoughts on time and the brain excercise that comes from ingesting the dense prose itself. It's worth reading alone to see the power a great writer can have with simple words.
March 17, 2021
The problem here is that John Updike can write. And he can write well. That being said, this book feels like he literally tried to write something with no direction, no plot, no theme, and just blend a bunch of non-sensical elements together to create something that would be prose-worthy.
The main character is unlikeable and unrelatable. In short, Ben is just a dirty old man. Updike tried give him a little depth by having him go on and on about mundane things and make it sound beautiful. But the execution was equivalent to listening to the ramblings and ravings of a senile old man with the same tendencies of perversion. And I certainly shouldn't neglect to mention the uncomfortable moments of pedophilia, the odd out-of-place cosmic shifts in the story, or the implicit dystopian, post-apocalyptic world that this is supposed to be set in.
I mean, does this book want to be a religious, sexual, or science-fiction experience related to death and dying? I don't know, but I would literally advise you NOT to read this one.
The main character is unlikeable and unrelatable. In short, Ben is just a dirty old man. Updike tried give him a little depth by having him go on and on about mundane things and make it sound beautiful. But the execution was equivalent to listening to the ramblings and ravings of a senile old man with the same tendencies of perversion. And I certainly shouldn't neglect to mention the uncomfortable moments of pedophilia, the odd out-of-place cosmic shifts in the story, or the implicit dystopian, post-apocalyptic world that this is supposed to be set in.
I mean, does this book want to be a religious, sexual, or science-fiction experience related to death and dying? I don't know, but I would literally advise you NOT to read this one.
January 8, 2019
Updike is among the most celebrated American authors of the twentieth century. I keep coming back to him, trying to figure out why. And I keep failing.
He certainly has erudition. He displays it constantly. But, to me, his stories make no sense. I think Im supposed to think that's my fault. I'm supposed to assume that they make no sense because I'm too dense to understand.
So Toward the End of Time is vaguely interesting. I finished it. The sex, as always is interesting, though I'm offended by the old man and the pre-teen.
But I'm not giving him the power to make me blame myself. Not this time. His book is prurient, pretentious nonsense.
He certainly has erudition. He displays it constantly. But, to me, his stories make no sense. I think Im supposed to think that's my fault. I'm supposed to assume that they make no sense because I'm too dense to understand.
So Toward the End of Time is vaguely interesting. I finished it. The sex, as always is interesting, though I'm offended by the old man and the pre-teen.
But I'm not giving him the power to make me blame myself. Not this time. His book is prurient, pretentious nonsense.
July 11, 2012
I didn't finish it. Between the skanky sex scenes and slow storyline I just decided to spend my limited time on this earth reading something else.
August 2, 2014
This is the best written rubbish I have ever endeavored to read. Jaded, I failed to finish.
July 17, 2022
The moment you start reading you know you're in the hands of a writer. There is an assuredness not just about the use of language but of a consciousness of tone and space. By 'space', I mean the awareness of a space about the narrator (in the first person) that enfolds their consciousness, as though we were looking at his immediate world from his eyes and mind. It's a bubble of consciousness (for want of a better analogy, like ectoplasm that expands with awareness of vicinity, growing and shrinking into pools about the house and garden, here now in the hall, there now in the garden about the deer, framed against the fringe of woods encrusted with snow), like an amorphous spotlight searching about in the dark. It's a very specific awareness that chimes exactly with one's own. This is the awareness of space I mean. A probing, expanding and shrinking consciousness. It's a gift, conveying the very generality of the experience in the specificity of the simple flow and pattern of thought (and by a pattern, something random, not uniform, but a pattern nonetheless, like piecing random jigsaw pieces together to reveal a part of the picture).
This is an ageing man's novel, and it feels good - to start with. The first person is no accident of the modern trend, but a specific appeal to posterity and senescent familiarity. It has that mild carping at the exponential little betrayals of the body and mind that growing older brings, an accreting curmudgeonliness that is one's flat-out right, buggar anyone else's silent judgementalism about your growing grumpiness, an older man's right more sane than to bear arms. And he does, about the garden in the snow of winter, scaring off the errant does who have little, even arrogantly defiant regard for one's euonymus. I indulge in his indulgences of such minor irritations of ageing like a favourite pair of slippers, wishing only that I could still smoke a pipe, buggar this confounded medical correctness. Come that age, you've earned these rights. 'The day was a hostile dare I must take, with a commensurate hostility' (Penguin Modern Classics, 2006, p.50).
This is brilliant, gorgeous writing that merges right inside the mind's eye with a fraternal familiarity, a series of third thoughts constantly musing on second thoughts. I feel right at home, instantly. Some writers have this ability, like Pratchett and Banks and Woolf, and you love being inside those comfortable slippers once again, the metaphorical fireplace ablaze and warm with a kin consideration of mood, mind, games and ventures, encompassing both the vexations and limits of man and age.
Ben counters his physical disintegration and incipient senility with small works (scaring off the deer with the borrowed shotgun, scooping up snow, a portfolio visit to his old work haunt, a pot or two of golf) and the sneaked-in pleasures of a prostitute, his wife Gloria still working, or on distant conferences. His descriptions of sex are as callow as his first adolescent fumblings, but it still embarrasses me. It's strange, I can look at porn with a flat equanimity, its lack of eroticism an aesthetic if not moral crime, but any hint of sex on the box or in the book and I turn away until its over. It somehow never works, and I still don't know why. Perhaps, as exposure over the decades has erased all inquisitiveness, it is laid out in all its messy humiliation, the body not what it was, the lack of gentle caring. Whatever. Not a metaphysical branch of inquiry that really interests.
Ben's metaphysics are the ponderings of the 'many worlds' theory of branching universes, the modern scientific counter to the faded gods and fate, Fortune and Neptune replaced by an idiot's finger on a button. It is post-Sino-American war, conducted by missile, and the economy has crashed, escalating world poverty and making him realise he made it just in time, before the ignominious catastrophe. Written in '97, it was pre-sub-prime and Covid, a war the likelier event. We are wiser now. And poorer. It seems things will never revert to their avaricious pre-teens state, a Golden Age of irresponsibility so flagrantly arrogant you wonder where human intelligence was hiding all that time (mostly under selfish greed). Ben is past the post, holed up in twelve acres of north Massachusetts woodland in a luxury few of us will ever be allowed to achieve. But the circumstances of his senescent decline await us all.
Then you realise that Gloria has gone, and the tone immediately shifts: pitiable pathos instead of sly-humoured bathos. The change is startling. Loneliness is a quality of life absurd, considering the sheer number of possible like matches. This is not Herzog, with his incessant intellectual posing in reams of objecting letters, nor Plato's seer in a cave, but you, as you will be soon, as you partly are now (without the house and twelve acres). This is your miserable fate in an overcrowded world, the permanent undercurrent of financial anxiety and the worrying attrition of current events turning the IBS and failing prostate into cold jelly joined by increasingly dodgy pipework, unable to sleep but for prescriptions that you have to remind them every month are still necessary (when it is they who have determined you need them for the rest of your life). The ignominy of it all. Our sympathies are our own. No wonder we all want to go back to a better world - even though it wasn't, really.
But the new world post-Sino-American war is one of pervasive threat. The economy pinched (how rarely it isn't), government and services not what they used to be (what's new?), local protection rackets from a new tribe of the displaced constantly threaten the periphery of Ben's landed enclave. All the disenfranchised opportunists have leeched out of the rotten woodwork and crawled into upright positions, brutal verbally and physically, using the bones of their former victims to threaten their new, unafraid of the 'haves', since no threat of police can threaten them. We complain about police states, because they protect established power and materialism instead of people, the community, but the fulcrum in the scales of their justice is a delicately poised thing. Without them, it's back to the old West or peering into the Dark Ages, every fief for itself.
And so Updike's wistful, cranky, reflective autobiographical fiction describes the 'last' lonely days of a man not yet old, but battling with ageing's vicissitudes, and we wonder where the story will go, as time's arrow lengthens towards its diachronic endpoint: will this be a tragic arc, or a comic, or likely, as most of our paths, the tragicomic - or comi-tragic? Will there be a resolution of recognition and redemption, or will he decline in lonely but relatively luxurious solitude, grasping at every extended human hand of disguised kindness, fending off depression while noticing every act of decency? For, surely, this is what we seek, as the march slows and lengthens.
But the intrusions of threat - the thuggish youths camping in his woods, the new protection racket, the weakness of government and law, the radiation zones, even the visiting spacecraft in the skies - shadow the work not with their exaggerated misgivings (there are enough in this world of over-population and redneck reactionism), but with their largely pedestrian quality. The threat thrums far too often within the long explorations of Nature and garden and woods, the growing emphasis on sexual response and memory, the pervading sense of encroaching senility, which make up the most part of the narrative. Why Updike chose to set this in a fictitious post-Sino-American War, instead of in the aggressive talons of the imperial eagle, is not beyond me, just unnecessary. These threats stand as exaggerated metaphors against our usual modern psychoses, of corrupt purblind government, of terrorism propping up first-world militarism, of the increasing encroachment of legal loopholes trashing civil liberties, and so on, ad infinitum.
In 50 years, the plight of African and Indian poverty has remained unaddressed except by charity, while the first world grows relatively richer, yet where the gulf between the wealthy and the poor is hardly addressed by any social welfare, in real terms, on the ground, week by week. Health care is better than it was, evidenced by the medical response to the pandemic, but most peoples' lives are fraught with financial insecurity. Ben, having made his packet before the bubble exploded, is using his wits to retain the piles and lands he had fought for through decades of twelve-hour days, as the disenfranchised encroach. Do we fear for him? Of course we do. The inevitable loss through one shanti construction in his woods to a burgeoning shanti town is the obvious outcome, and then, whence all decency? But it makes for unpleasant reading - and makes it's point about the rampant social inequalities.
The problem is, the novel never really develops anything, in terms of plot, but the unwanted tenants and their squalid, pugnacious threatening. There is no narrative arc, it rambles on until you lose interest, and wish it were more like Couples, which was rich in character and social observation. This is a wittering, twittering ramble, vaguely dystopian without any real connection to the outside world, but the immediate flora and fauna. And perhaps that is the point of it, the increasing self-isolation from an increasingly distasteful world, a grudging plaint about the impoverished state, the lassitude of no longer belonging, despite the rural comfort. Likewise, Updike gets lost in his immediate enclave and his physical deterioration, but he also gets lost in an overly-floral language of unwieldy, complicated, 'baroquely ornate' (p.268) imagery and metaphor that make what he's saying diffuse and the mind lose interest. He also dwells too much on the unseemly detail of sexual encounter and his plunging recto-urinary health, giving the thing a lurid leering old man's obsessional foetidness in his ailing visceral preoccupation. I'm sure the book became increasingly rank of stale sweat, and worse. Most unpleasant. This is, fortunately, countered by some exquisitely colourful description of nature and its persistent fecundity.
It started out a 9/10 and ended up a 5/10. One reason why it took ages to finish. I finished it out of respect, and didn't need to, for I missed nothing revelatory. I was seeking wisdom, and I did not find it. But reluctantly had to find out where the arrow landed. Not far from the bow. This was erroneously classified as science fiction, but was really an autobiographical drama - despite his denial as such in the endnotes of ‘these crabbed, confessional, divagatory pages’ (p.338) - without the drama. So be it. So-so it was.
This is an ageing man's novel, and it feels good - to start with. The first person is no accident of the modern trend, but a specific appeal to posterity and senescent familiarity. It has that mild carping at the exponential little betrayals of the body and mind that growing older brings, an accreting curmudgeonliness that is one's flat-out right, buggar anyone else's silent judgementalism about your growing grumpiness, an older man's right more sane than to bear arms. And he does, about the garden in the snow of winter, scaring off the errant does who have little, even arrogantly defiant regard for one's euonymus. I indulge in his indulgences of such minor irritations of ageing like a favourite pair of slippers, wishing only that I could still smoke a pipe, buggar this confounded medical correctness. Come that age, you've earned these rights. 'The day was a hostile dare I must take, with a commensurate hostility' (Penguin Modern Classics, 2006, p.50).
This is brilliant, gorgeous writing that merges right inside the mind's eye with a fraternal familiarity, a series of third thoughts constantly musing on second thoughts. I feel right at home, instantly. Some writers have this ability, like Pratchett and Banks and Woolf, and you love being inside those comfortable slippers once again, the metaphorical fireplace ablaze and warm with a kin consideration of mood, mind, games and ventures, encompassing both the vexations and limits of man and age.
Ben counters his physical disintegration and incipient senility with small works (scaring off the deer with the borrowed shotgun, scooping up snow, a portfolio visit to his old work haunt, a pot or two of golf) and the sneaked-in pleasures of a prostitute, his wife Gloria still working, or on distant conferences. His descriptions of sex are as callow as his first adolescent fumblings, but it still embarrasses me. It's strange, I can look at porn with a flat equanimity, its lack of eroticism an aesthetic if not moral crime, but any hint of sex on the box or in the book and I turn away until its over. It somehow never works, and I still don't know why. Perhaps, as exposure over the decades has erased all inquisitiveness, it is laid out in all its messy humiliation, the body not what it was, the lack of gentle caring. Whatever. Not a metaphysical branch of inquiry that really interests.
Ben's metaphysics are the ponderings of the 'many worlds' theory of branching universes, the modern scientific counter to the faded gods and fate, Fortune and Neptune replaced by an idiot's finger on a button. It is post-Sino-American war, conducted by missile, and the economy has crashed, escalating world poverty and making him realise he made it just in time, before the ignominious catastrophe. Written in '97, it was pre-sub-prime and Covid, a war the likelier event. We are wiser now. And poorer. It seems things will never revert to their avaricious pre-teens state, a Golden Age of irresponsibility so flagrantly arrogant you wonder where human intelligence was hiding all that time (mostly under selfish greed). Ben is past the post, holed up in twelve acres of north Massachusetts woodland in a luxury few of us will ever be allowed to achieve. But the circumstances of his senescent decline await us all.
Then you realise that Gloria has gone, and the tone immediately shifts: pitiable pathos instead of sly-humoured bathos. The change is startling. Loneliness is a quality of life absurd, considering the sheer number of possible like matches. This is not Herzog, with his incessant intellectual posing in reams of objecting letters, nor Plato's seer in a cave, but you, as you will be soon, as you partly are now (without the house and twelve acres). This is your miserable fate in an overcrowded world, the permanent undercurrent of financial anxiety and the worrying attrition of current events turning the IBS and failing prostate into cold jelly joined by increasingly dodgy pipework, unable to sleep but for prescriptions that you have to remind them every month are still necessary (when it is they who have determined you need them for the rest of your life). The ignominy of it all. Our sympathies are our own. No wonder we all want to go back to a better world - even though it wasn't, really.
But the new world post-Sino-American war is one of pervasive threat. The economy pinched (how rarely it isn't), government and services not what they used to be (what's new?), local protection rackets from a new tribe of the displaced constantly threaten the periphery of Ben's landed enclave. All the disenfranchised opportunists have leeched out of the rotten woodwork and crawled into upright positions, brutal verbally and physically, using the bones of their former victims to threaten their new, unafraid of the 'haves', since no threat of police can threaten them. We complain about police states, because they protect established power and materialism instead of people, the community, but the fulcrum in the scales of their justice is a delicately poised thing. Without them, it's back to the old West or peering into the Dark Ages, every fief for itself.
And so Updike's wistful, cranky, reflective autobiographical fiction describes the 'last' lonely days of a man not yet old, but battling with ageing's vicissitudes, and we wonder where the story will go, as time's arrow lengthens towards its diachronic endpoint: will this be a tragic arc, or a comic, or likely, as most of our paths, the tragicomic - or comi-tragic? Will there be a resolution of recognition and redemption, or will he decline in lonely but relatively luxurious solitude, grasping at every extended human hand of disguised kindness, fending off depression while noticing every act of decency? For, surely, this is what we seek, as the march slows and lengthens.
But the intrusions of threat - the thuggish youths camping in his woods, the new protection racket, the weakness of government and law, the radiation zones, even the visiting spacecraft in the skies - shadow the work not with their exaggerated misgivings (there are enough in this world of over-population and redneck reactionism), but with their largely pedestrian quality. The threat thrums far too often within the long explorations of Nature and garden and woods, the growing emphasis on sexual response and memory, the pervading sense of encroaching senility, which make up the most part of the narrative. Why Updike chose to set this in a fictitious post-Sino-American War, instead of in the aggressive talons of the imperial eagle, is not beyond me, just unnecessary. These threats stand as exaggerated metaphors against our usual modern psychoses, of corrupt purblind government, of terrorism propping up first-world militarism, of the increasing encroachment of legal loopholes trashing civil liberties, and so on, ad infinitum.
In 50 years, the plight of African and Indian poverty has remained unaddressed except by charity, while the first world grows relatively richer, yet where the gulf between the wealthy and the poor is hardly addressed by any social welfare, in real terms, on the ground, week by week. Health care is better than it was, evidenced by the medical response to the pandemic, but most peoples' lives are fraught with financial insecurity. Ben, having made his packet before the bubble exploded, is using his wits to retain the piles and lands he had fought for through decades of twelve-hour days, as the disenfranchised encroach. Do we fear for him? Of course we do. The inevitable loss through one shanti construction in his woods to a burgeoning shanti town is the obvious outcome, and then, whence all decency? But it makes for unpleasant reading - and makes it's point about the rampant social inequalities.
The problem is, the novel never really develops anything, in terms of plot, but the unwanted tenants and their squalid, pugnacious threatening. There is no narrative arc, it rambles on until you lose interest, and wish it were more like Couples, which was rich in character and social observation. This is a wittering, twittering ramble, vaguely dystopian without any real connection to the outside world, but the immediate flora and fauna. And perhaps that is the point of it, the increasing self-isolation from an increasingly distasteful world, a grudging plaint about the impoverished state, the lassitude of no longer belonging, despite the rural comfort. Likewise, Updike gets lost in his immediate enclave and his physical deterioration, but he also gets lost in an overly-floral language of unwieldy, complicated, 'baroquely ornate' (p.268) imagery and metaphor that make what he's saying diffuse and the mind lose interest. He also dwells too much on the unseemly detail of sexual encounter and his plunging recto-urinary health, giving the thing a lurid leering old man's obsessional foetidness in his ailing visceral preoccupation. I'm sure the book became increasingly rank of stale sweat, and worse. Most unpleasant. This is, fortunately, countered by some exquisitely colourful description of nature and its persistent fecundity.
It started out a 9/10 and ended up a 5/10. One reason why it took ages to finish. I finished it out of respect, and didn't need to, for I missed nothing revelatory. I was seeking wisdom, and I did not find it. But reluctantly had to find out where the arrow landed. Not far from the bow. This was erroneously classified as science fiction, but was really an autobiographical drama - despite his denial as such in the endnotes of ‘these crabbed, confessional, divagatory pages’ (p.338) - without the drama. So be it. So-so it was.
July 24, 2022
Not shown; another half-star. Am mindful, when reading Updike, of field trips to Chicago's art museums, their impressionists collections. Masterpieces all. The suggestion of a captured glimmering moment from another time down to the merest pigmented brushstroke. None so much as wasted. Essential elements, illuminatingly layered in hyper-realized perfection. Such is Updike's palette, his deftly rendered prose which is worthy of pause, if only to reflect on what a rare, visual art form the written word can become. Secondarily, the reader is invited to process Ben's story (and Updike's own) perhaps after the fact. Stepping back from an immediate sense of awe for his eloquence to call to mind the meaning of the randomized shifts in his narrative and their significance. Our preoccupation with a relationship with his current wife has her mysteriously vanish begetting another spontaneously with a prostitute. Showing off for his son's skinny redhaired wife, he backs carelessly into the garage damaging his Subaru; cut away to another tangent about the origin of the species--a National Geographic (?) article on Neandert(h)al man. He's urinating, cut away to interactive particle physics phenomena about protons. He's also an avid reader of Scientific American. He's rummaging in the attic with his prostitute lust-interest of the moment. Fly off then and back in ancient history on another non-sequitor about Egyptian grave robbers. National Geographic, again? Though no references there to be found, I'm certain, of suffocating closeness in the tomb where one smells his partner-in-crime's "uncircumcised sex." Easter prompts him to go from an emergent budding garden report to a researched encyclopedic biblical visitation on St. Paul, Christ, christology, and crisis theology. Updike's due dilligence is on display as he drills down and holds absolute sway over his embedded literary classroom. Despite his formidable Ivy League intelligence, Updike's not an insufferable bore. Never...well, almost...resurrected perpetually by his endearing sense of humor. The result of, and my own reaction to, this fictionalized journal in the first person pursuing an arbitrary stream of consciousness is contrarily mixed. His passages, at their best, recall perfected Thoreaunian influences (similarly inspired by Massachusetts nativity) of Walden Pond merging Godliness and Nature with the definitude of scientific observation, then leveraging a transcendental, pastoral license (his surrounding opulent forested acreage on ocean beachfront with elaborate gardens--yields details down to microscopic granularity of flora and fauna) that is jointly poetically imbued and metaphorically vivid. The book after-all equates his life with the passing of the seasons. At Updike's worst, he fetishizes in lurid detail (as may be autobiographically discomforting) indulging rude sexual fantasies about women, shamelessly objectifying even those of adolescent age who he has his way with. His libido manifests itself rather grotesquely as he pathetically overcompensates for his lost youth dreading, at 67, his inevitable mortality. The narrative all too frequently devolves into a lecherous wallowing of odors, tastes, sounds, sensations, textures, anatomical fixations pornographically contextualized describing genitalia and various acts (imagined and experienced) with their attendant excretions and exchanges of body fluids. To such a gratuitous degree that Updike's usual high-standard for literary achievement is regrettably diminished. Perpetrations forced upon the reader disgustingly for shock-effect, or self-deprecatingly for humorous effect, or for what ever reason--who knows?--maybe if only to offer up a semblance to his contemporaries like the pervy Roth. Explains, no doubt, his reduced stature given a rating of three-stars made higher by only a fraction of another. One pet peeve that stood out for me was his deliberate, repeated grammatical violation of using "I" instead of "me" for the objective form. So totally affected and pretentious. And disruptive. Can understand the confusion attributed to the preferred usage "who" vs. "whom" (equally pretentious to the detriment of posers who/whom don't know better). His editors stepped aside, took their cut, and wrote it off--Updike being Updike--to a token stylistic preference. In the final analysis, Updike's 47th book is entertaining to the last and in every bit reflects his genius. Every bit. And that's saying a lot at 65. As Margaret Atwood so aptly coined in her NYT review of the book: "It is deplorably good."
September 6, 2018
These are the musings over one year of a 66 year-old man set in 2020 after the nuclear US-China war. Government has collapsed but a privileged life still goes on in Massachusetts. The book was copyrighted in 1997 but at one point the gardener is thinking of seeking a better life in Mexico. But so many people have been doing the same that Mexico built a wall!
April 21, 2025
David Foster Wallace wrote that Toward the End of Time was John Updike's worst novel. I haven't read them all so I can't say, but Updike was such a master of observation and description that reading anything he wrote is always at least instructive. I've never read anything by him that I was sorry to have read.
He makes a simple walk to the end of the driveway to pick up the day's newspaper after a snowfall an interesting event:
You can hate him for his attitude toward women but I don't. My biggest qualm with this novel is how much time he spends on describing the plant life around him. I admire and respect people who know about plants and trees, but going on as long and as often as Updike does about them was as if he had long passages in a language I don't know. There should be a rule for writers that no more than two percent of your work should be spent describing specific plant species and how they look at different times of the year. I'd guess in this book he spends at least ten percent of it doing so, probably more.
If your vocabulary is as bad as mine, you will want to have a dictionary handing if reading a print edition so you can look up words like exiguous, oneiric, chthonic and exeget.
He makes a simple walk to the end of the driveway to pick up the day's newspaper after a snowfall an interesting event:
The Globe delivery man always prudently stops at the mailbox. As I, having squeezed my feet into my L.L. Bean Maine Hunting Shoes, walked down to retrieve the morning paper, I observed in addition to my own tracks (which imitate chains laid closely parallel) others: the clustered four paws of the hopping rabbit; the stately punctures, almost in a line, of the deer; the dainty marks, shaped like pansies, of the Kelly's cat, who comes over here to stalk the Y-footed birds that feed on our purple pokeberries; and a troubling set of prints, as widely spaced as the deer's but larger and multiply padded. In trying to picture the animal I could only imagine a lion. A smallish lion. One reads that, as the woods of the Northeast encroach more and more upon cleared fields, bears and coyotes and mountain lions are spreading south. As our species, having given itself a hard hit, staggers, the others, all but counted out, move in. Think of those days when the hominids were just a two-footed furry footnote lost amid the thundering herds of horned perissodactyls. Why does that thought make us happy?
You can hate him for his attitude toward women but I don't. My biggest qualm with this novel is how much time he spends on describing the plant life around him. I admire and respect people who know about plants and trees, but going on as long and as often as Updike does about them was as if he had long passages in a language I don't know. There should be a rule for writers that no more than two percent of your work should be spent describing specific plant species and how they look at different times of the year. I'd guess in this book he spends at least ten percent of it doing so, probably more.
If your vocabulary is as bad as mine, you will want to have a dictionary handing if reading a print edition so you can look up words like exiguous, oneiric, chthonic and exeget.
September 13, 2016
It hardly matters sometimes what Mr. Updike is talking about. It could be grand or trivial, the Ten Commandments or a grocery list-- the intricacy, the majesty, the miracle of his prose tends to make any subject thrilling, even if it shouldn't by all rights interest you.
In Toward, of course, he knows no restrictions.... so many subjects, an endless variety. He and his main character jump around in time and space like some hyper-educated Billy Pilgrim, from ancient Egypt to Jesus's Galillee to a post-apocalyptic America, educating the reader with his insights in the process.
Together with his prose, and ever-present eroticism, that's what I like most about Updike: one comes away from his books feeling not only hugely entertained but measurably smarter, and in none is this more evident than in Toward. Indeed, this review having planted its seed, I've decided to read it a second time, but dense with diamonds as it is, probably not the last.
In Toward, of course, he knows no restrictions.... so many subjects, an endless variety. He and his main character jump around in time and space like some hyper-educated Billy Pilgrim, from ancient Egypt to Jesus's Galillee to a post-apocalyptic America, educating the reader with his insights in the process.
Together with his prose, and ever-present eroticism, that's what I like most about Updike: one comes away from his books feeling not only hugely entertained but measurably smarter, and in none is this more evident than in Toward. Indeed, this review having planted its seed, I've decided to read it a second time, but dense with diamonds as it is, probably not the last.
July 25, 2012
Random musings of a grumpy and horny old white guy. Pretty mundane and boring, no, sedate is more descriptive, most of the time with some interesting bits that shed light on the state of the world in 2020 - surprisingly normal given there had been a nuclear exchange between the US and China! I suppose life in a quiet almost rural New England neighborhood could conceivably still remain untouched, with hints of decay and the breakdown of central authority here and there, from roving gangs demanding protection money, to the shadow of an abandoned space station hanging in the sky. The author flexes his intellectual muscles in writing randomly about esoteric subjects like astrophysics and Norse mythology but nothing much actually happens to the characters, only the passage of the four seasons mark the progress of the novel.
December 27, 2016
Some of Updike's finest nature writing, and an altogether bracing view of mortality. The science fiction-y elements are sparse but well-employed. It's just a matter of, can you get past the sex stuff, which is probably the worst of his career. That's saying quite a bit. At times he seems like the one kid in class who could draw his own penis so well, with such detail - you had to wonder if he could draw anything else. Otherwise a decent ramble literally down the garden path. (DFW's hatchet job re: this book accomplishes what a hatchet job should, which is fucking cut to the subject to smithereens, but it ignores a good deal of what makes Updike's work meaningful. There's a lot about marriage and gardening that is worthwhile.)
September 4, 2009
This book is about a lonely bored horny old man and his life after the Sino-American nuclear holocaust. Even though stylistically Updike makes the mundane seem magnificent with his words, his subject matter is still mundane therefore uninteresting. It seems the action in his books are in the characters mind and nothing else. I think this is where Philip Roth is superior to John Updike. Whereas Roth has a dynamic story line that matches the characters dynamic inner personality, Updike has his characters have a dynamic personality surrounded with the mundane.
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