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T A B L E+T A L K

Why can't booksellers sell short story collections? Do they require more concentration that readers can muster? Discuss it in Table Talk.

F E A T U R E

Alienated
The Salon Interview:
Caleb Carr
The author discusses serial killers, murderous moms and growing up terrorized by the Beats (10/06/97)

R E C E N T L Y

The Tetherballs of Bougainville
By Mark Leyner
Fiction
(10/06/97)

Gorilla Suit
By Bob Paris
Nonfiction
(10/03/97)

Jesus Saves
By Darcy Steinke
Fiction
(10/02/97)

Hand to Mouth
A Chronicle of Early Failure
By Paul Auster
Nonfiction
(10/01/97)

Great Apes
By Will Self
Fiction
(09/30/97)

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toward the end of time

BY JOHN UPDIKE

KNOPF

FICTION

334 PAGES

BY DWIGHT GARNER | john Updike's new novel, his 17th, is the closest he's come to writing science fiction. "Toward the End of Time" is set just north of Boston in the year 2020, shortly after the United States has fought a catastrophic war with China. New York and L.A. have been virtually obliterated; the plains are a radioactive dust bowl. An abandoned satellite hangs in the night sky like an unholy second moon, the remnants of a space colony whose members perished (on live television) after a generator failed and "the scattered populations of the Earth lacked the technical resources to send a rescue mission aloft."

What's remarkable about "Toward the End of Time," given its surfeit of post-apocalyptic paranoia and dread, is how much it feels like a typical suburban Updike novel. The book's narrator, a 66-year-old retired investment counselor named Ben Turnbull, wryly observes the chaos from the remove of his roomy old house on the Massachusetts coast. Not everything has changed: The electricity and water still flow, and the New York Times still lands with a thwack on the porch in the morning. For Turnbull and his wife, adjusting to post-war realities merely means getting used to the fact that the dollar has been replaced by a local scrip called the Welder (after former Gov. William Weld); that they need to pay protection money to a variety of racketeers; that Federal Express is trying to take over what's left of the government and move it to its Memphis, Tenn., headquarters; and that schoolchildren are reading textbook editions "of that twentieth-century master, John Grisham."

Updike chronicles these disquieting events without letting them intrude much on the twin themes of "Toward the End of Time" -- death and sex, not necessarily in that order. On each of those topics, Updike delivers some of his most searching, and scalding writing to date. Presented in the form of extended journal entries, the novel probes Turnbull's obsession with his failing body -- a body that seems to have become "a swamp in whose simmering depths a fatal infirmity must be brewing." He looks at nature around him and begins to see only a "universe packed black with death." He's plainly frightened.

Turnbull escapes these grim musings, as Updike's men are wont to do, by immersing himself in the rude "aliveness" of sex. "Toward the End of Time" might be, in its way, the most frankly sexual book Updike has written, and that's saying something. Updike puts you right inside Turnbull's "horny old hide," and he doesn't spare you the nastier bits of his consciousness -- his obsession with whores, his references to women as "choice" cuts of meat, the sexual heat he builds up for a 13-year-old girl. Turnbull's observations about men and women contain just as much acid. "Females carry the burden of the world, I think, but men the magic -- the universal magic, the glittering superdense sperm at the heart of the Big Bang," he muses. And also: "Ferocious female nagging is the price men pay for our much-lamented prerogatives, the power and the mobility and the penis." It's hard to read this book without sharing Turnbull's opinion that "We are condemned, men and women, to hostile symbiosis."

"Toward the End of Time" is going to offend many readers, notably Updike's feminist detractors. What struck me about this raw, vinegary novel, however, were the ways in which Updike, as he himself approaches old age and eventual death, seems doubly committed to investigating every nook and cranny of his own very male consciousness -- even those he might find less than appealing. That's the novelist's job, and Updike refuses to back down. There's an elegiac quality, finally, to this novel's brutishness. Late in the book, Turnbull is reduced, after a prostate operation, to wearing Depends diapers under his clothes. He stares down inside them and observes that "my poor prick is as red and flaccid as a rooster's comb." That's when he asks this novel's bedrock question: "How could so superfluous an appendage ever have served as the the hub of my universe?"
SALON | Oct. 7, 1997