Tuesday, Sept. 30, 1997 | 8:06 a.m.
"Toward the End of Time," the latest novel by John Updike, prompts the same question raised by Joyce Carol Oates's last novel: how can such a gifted writer produce such a lousy book?
How could this veteran novelist, who just last year published the magisterial and masterly "In the Beauty of the Lilies," follow that dazzling performance with this callous and perfunctory book?
Is it that Updike poured everything he really cared about into that last volume, and was left temporarily drained? Is it the self-imposed pressure of publishing at least one new book a year? Or is it simply that many prolific authors, regardless of their talent, produce their share of lemons?
Certainly, "Toward the End of Time" belongs to Updike's lemon category, along with "The Witches of Eastwick" (1984), "S" (1988) and "Brazil" (1994), other books that also try unsuccessfully to push the envelope of the author's talent and fail to exploit his strengths as a naturalistic writer.
In each of these novels, Updike's usual sympathy for - and insight into - his characters gives way to cartoonish caricature, while his fascination with the intricacies of marriage, adultery and male-female relations devolves into the clumsy string-pulling of a chauvinistic puppeteer.
In the case of "Toward the End of Time," Updike has produced a particularly sour, ugly and haphazardly constructed novel, which takes the form of a journal kept in the year 2020 by a 66-year-old retired investment counselor named Ben Turnbull who lives in a splendid mansion in Massachusetts. Though Ben shares basic Updikean traits with a host of earlier characters - importunate sexual urges combined with vague spiritual yearnings, an inclination toward melancholy introspection, and a love of golf - he actually turns out to have less in common with the likes of Harry (Rabbit) Angstrom or Richard Maple than he does with Mickey Sabbath, the repellent hero of Philip Roth's 1995 novel, "Sabbath's Theater."
Like Sabbath, Ben is a narcissistic and dirty-minded old man - self-absorbed, bitter and malicious. He is cut off from the outside world, contemptuous of other people's feelings and obsessed with excrement, sex and death. He is not only a highly unpleasant character, but also one who is implausible and impossible to understand. His rage and disgust are grounded in no discernable cause; his contempt for women, in no emotional history.
In the course of this book, Ben urges (or imagines urging) a gang of teen-agers to burn down a neighbor's house that is blocking his view of the sea. He urges them to kill another neighbor's pets. He fantasizes about killing his wife, Gloria. He plays sexual games with a 13-year-old girl. And he imagines having sex with a deer that lives in the woods behind his house.
Ben's descriptions of the women in his life are uniformly sexist and condescending. He portrays his wife as "a cheerful, soignee vulture" who loses all interest in him once prostate cancer leaves him impotent. He depicts his mistress, Deirdre (who is supposed to be some sort of reincarnation of the deer he lusts after), as a foul-smelling whore who spouts feminist claptrap. He describes a woman in his former office as "a choice cut of meat." And he daydreams about watching his daughter-in-law sit on a toilet.
If this weren't bad enough, the reader is also subjected to Ben's self-important and self-serving philosophizing about relationships between the sexes. He is constantly saying things like, "Females carry the burden of the world, I think, but men the magic - the universal magic, the glittering super-dense sperm that spurted out of nothing to make the Big Bang." Or, "Through the bodies of women men conduct what tortured dealings they can with the universe, producing serial murder and morganatic marriages and a Morgan Library's worth of love letters, novels and death threats."
When Ben isn't blathering on about women, he's talking, equally distastefully, about his own bodily functions: his increasingly frequent need to urinate, and his aging body's odors. Interspersed with these disquisitions are strange asides narrated from the point of view of an Egyptian grave robber ("A pox on Horus! May Anubis dine on his own excrement in the life everlasting"), a ninth-century monk and a Nazi guard. These people presumably represent other incarnations of Ben, who seems to believe in the notion of parallel universes and multiple lives.
As depicted by Updike, however, these other people's stories shed little light on Ben's current existence, except to point up how narrow and indulgent a life he leads. In fact these perfunctorily executed passages feel as though they were shoehorned into the narrative in a desperate attempt to lend the story a significance it lacks.
To make matters worse, Updike's decision to set Ben's story in a post-World War III future - America has supposedly been devastated by a nuclear war with China - is never fleshed out. This setup robs Updike of the opportunity to use his fierce, pictorial gift for observation, and as a result, the social fabric of the novel feels unusually flimsy. Instead of situating Ben in a palpable world, Updike has his narcissistic hero babble on ridiculously about minutiae like his underwear.
The result sounds suspiciously like a Nicholson Baker parody of Updike: "Sitting on the toilet yesterday, I suddenly saw as if for the first time the miraculous knit of the Jockey underpants stretched across my knees. Tiny needles, functioning in cunning clusters at inhuman speeds, had contrived to entangle tiny white threads with perfect regularity to form this comfortably pliable, lightweight and slightly elastic fabric."
At the same time, Updike never really tries to imagine what a futuristic America might be like. With the exception of one funny conceit (that Federal Express has replaced the defunct federal government as a supplier of social services and law enforcement), Updike's future looks very much like the present: there are problems with random violence, inner-city decay and teen-age crime; people spend a lot of time at malls and wear blue jeans and "barbarically ornate running shoes."
As he did in his "Rabbit" books, Updike seems to want to draw an analogy between the world (this time, a "dwindled, senile world") and his hero's state of mind. Ben feels beleaguered, anxious and adrift; ergo, the world, too, is beleaguered, anxious and adrift.
Although Updike's characters have always been haunted by existential intimations of mortality, those feelings seem heightened in Ben's case. They stem not from his cancer, which is diagnosed only toward the end of the book, but from his weariness with life and marriage and the human condition. The seasonal shifts in sunlight, the rhythms of growth and decay in his garden, the theory of a collapsing universe, all become, in Ben's mind, symptoms of his own imminent demise.
Similar feelings, of course, surfaced in Updike's last "Rabbit" novel and his last collection of stories, but those books depicted such emotional states with wonderful sympathy and nuance. In "Toward the End of Time," those emotions simply feel like the complaints of a selfish, spoiled man.
archive
