TOWARD THE END OF TIME
By John Updike
Knopf, 334 pages, $25
`Trust Me,” one of John Updike’s very fine collections of stories implores. Many readers have trusted Updike, for many years. One looks to him for the straight news of sexual relations between men and women. He is also a stylist of the highest order, capable of illuminating the sublime in the mundane, thereby elevating all of human experience. He names the world’s subtle beauties and makes them, by articulation, into art.
“Toward the End of Time,” his most recent book, is another in a long line of novel experiments for Updike. He will never be done with his obsessive chronicling of the battle between head and heart, intellect and animal, and this year’s model charts the decline of one Ben Turnbull, who is keeping a journal of his 66th year in the not-so-distant future of America, 2020. Although inhabiting and reporting on an eerily diminished world, he is a familiar Updike character: by turns rhapsodic and coarse, sensitive and sexist, philosophical and narcissistic. Ben’s narrative roams, its structure loosely derived from the simple procession of the seasons and the demands of the garden he and his wife, Gloria, cultivate, but mostly from the ranging associations he makes in his restless retirement.
Updike is a riff master, able to spin gold from straw in a matter of moments. The novel is launched from a simple premise: Ben’s wife wishes to eliminate the deer from her garden, and in his typical brilliant fashion, the author moves from the particular, the simple, to the globally sublime. “Among the anti-deer methods that my wife has tried is scattering human hair over the hedges and bushes. I was humiliated to ask at my barber shop for some hair clippings, but they jollily gave me a whole transparent garbage bag full of the stuff, a single day’s sweepings. Young glossy hair, glinting reddish hair, hair with gray in it, straight and curly hair clipped in the hirsute fullness of life–the giant bagful, eerily light to hoist, savored of atrocity, of those orderly death camps in the middle of the last century which ended forever Europe’s concept of itself as civilized and of the Western world as proceeding under a benign special Providence.”
Language as well as character move from the familiar to the surreal in the course of this novel. Not only is Ben a diminished man, the world he lives in has fallen apart. After a devastating world war, the U.S. limps along, impotent, looking toward its southern neighbors for salvation. Up in the sky hovers what might be a craft from another planet. God died a while ago, and all the other patriarchal structures–local police, federal government–have crumbled. The old rules no longer apply, and the enforcers of the new rules are young boys and sexually viable women.
What follows from the simple premise (deer removal) is a long, surreal chapter in which a prostitute, Deirdre (not only named like a deer but described like one), moves into the house after Gloria has disappeared (Ben seems to believe he has shot his wife). Ben is keeping a journal of this maybe-fantasy, and a great deal of the novel’s tension resides in the reader’s questioning the fictional world’s terms: Is it me, or is this character completely out to lunch? Later, Ben assumes the points of view of historically placed figures: an Egyptian grave robber, a contemporary of Christ’s, an unnamed citizen of a world in which only a fungal substance cohabits. In his retirement, he is noting the ways in which the world no longer needs him, allying himself with a host of superfluous figures. His only business skills are disrespected in his former office and prove useful only with the errant children who squat on his property. His wife (whom, it turns out, he has not shot) manages to succeed in all arenas where he has failed, retaining, and growing in, her power as homeowner and sexual being as Ben falters.
The reader ought to feel empathetic with Ben; his tragic emasculation ought to compel us. Updike is careful to give him volition, bad habits, prejudices–in short, the markings of a man not to be pitied so much as understood. And there are plenty of poignant moments when Ben’s understanding of his life-lived-wrong strikes a blow of recognition. But Ben often lacks the charm of Updike’s best men. It’s not that a character need be likable so much as he need be endearingly flawed, as Rabbit Angstrom is.
The most pleasing moments in this novel are the ones in which Ben provides insights into regret; he has not lived as he should have, which of course is one of the most useful lessons literature has to offer. On recalling his first marriage and subsequent first affair, Ben feels “again alive, in that moment of constant present emergency in which animals healthily live.” On the subject of his fatherhood during this time he says: “This period of my children’s childhoods seems as I look back upon it one great loss and waste, through my distraction. I gave them shelter and went through the motions but I remember mostly sorrow–broken bones, dead gerbils and dogs, little round faces wet with tears, a sickening river of junk food, and their sad attempt, all five of them before they passed into the secrecy of adolescence, to call me out of myself into the sunshine of their love.”
The pure expression of regret runs like a river through the novel. Ben recalls when he was still married to his first wife, “in our colonial house on East Main Street in Coverdale; we are vaguely surrounded by children in all sizes, but the real seethe is between us and our peers, the other young couples, all closeted in their homes yet dying to burst out, each marital partner helplessly seeking, as in a beaker of jiggled chemicals, to bond with another. A thrilling, tragic tangle of illicit alliances past and future is spread beneath us like a net beneath the flying bodies of trapeze artists; we are still lithe, though in our thirties. Our houses and gardens are neglected; our children signal for our attention in the corners of our eyes. The melting walls of domesticity, the too-many points of contact–with spouses, lovers, would-be lovers, still-living parents, children daily growing more complicated and knowing, cats and dogs whose sudden deaths underline the terror of it all. . . .”
This is the sexual frequency occupied so beautifully in Updike’s novel “Couples.” But the sex in “Toward the End of Time” is coarse and unlovely. One hates to believe that the writer is telling the truth, that age engenders only ugliness, incontinence, bitterness and regret.
“Toward the End of Time” does not quite cohere; while one might be able to construct a logic for why and how it achieves synthesis, the best novels offer up that coherence without necessitating mental calisthenics or lawyerly rationalizing. The best books simply walk.
Perhaps we are merely too enmeshed in Ben’s sensibility, which means that other characters do not become fully real. The world itself–futuristic, vaguely alien–requires a certain level of attention from the writer and the reader that might otherwise have been spent in getting to know the secondary characters. Updike is a transcendent short-story writer and a very uneven novelist. The qualities that distinguish him in short prose–the masterful capture of the precise moment when a life reveals itself, the glorious use of language and detail–oftentimes invite skimming in the novels. Plot mechanics seem irrelevant, the astute observations like gems scattered in the sand. “After a certain age,” Ben says, “marriage is mostly, its bitter and tender moments both, a mental game of thrust and parry played on the edge of the grave.”
For insights such as these, you must follow John Updike into the venue of his choice. He remains an unparalleled messenger.
