Toward the End of Time - Softcover

John Updike

Softcover

ISBN 10: 0140271422 ISBN 13: 9780140271423

Publisher: Penguin, 1998

Synopsis

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.

About this title

About the Author

John Updike was born in 1932, in Shillington, Pennsylvania. He graduated from Harvard College in 1954, and spent a year in England, at the Ruskin School of Drawing and Fine Art in Oxford. From 1955 to 1957 he was a member of the staff of The New Yorker, to which he has contributed poems, short stories, essays, and book reviews. Since 1957 he has lived in Massachusetts. His novels have won the Pulitzer Prize, the National Book Award, and the National Book Critics Circle Award.

Review

Mr. Updike's latest novel opens with a first snowfall and a disagreement between the narrator, a retired financial adviser, and his still very active wife. Ben Turnbull wants to relax and enjoy the natural world. She wants the property to resemble a parquet floor. These people are living, however, in the year 2020. There has been a disastrous Sino-American nuclear war. The remnants of the federal government are holed up somewhere, sending out tax bills that nobody pays. Massachusetts does local business with a scrip called welders. The novel purports to be Ben's journal. There are elements of magic realism in the text, and a few borrowings from science fiction, but futuristic fantasy is the book's basic character. It combines melancholy reflections on the passage of time with the author's mischievously idiosyncratic notions of what will survive Ragnarok. The list includes nagging wives, National Geographic, the North Shore commuter line, opportunistic crime, the pursuit of young girls by old boys, UPS, and the telephone, on which mechanical voices continue to order the pushing of buttons that lead ad infinitum to other mechanical voices. Ben considers history and golf games. He meditates on black holes and his health. He records weather and seasons with precision and lyrical appreciation. He observes that "if not magical, men are not much," and describes a corpse as "this slumped puddle of deactivated molecules." He becomes, without warning or explanation, a man of other times and places. Altogether, he is a fascinating, amusing, eloquent companion, and one feels genuine regret when the year, his journal, and with them Mr. Updike's novel come to an end. -- The Atlantic Monthly, Phoebe-Lou Adams

The future isn't what it used to be. A century ago futuristic novels were radiantly utopian, but as the 20th century clouded over, so did the fictional future.... (Updike's) most recent novel,In the Beauty of the Lilies, rendered four generations of 20th-century Americans with brilliant, Flemish-painting precision. But there was a dark undertone to that novel, and Toward the End of Time picks it up and runs with it all the way into the year 2020. -- Entertainment Weekly

The branching imagination in this novel--call it Mr. Updike's art--is occupied with roads not taken, and some of them go back a long way, to the author of the Mark gospel, or to a pair of Egyptian tomb-robbers, or to a monk in the Dark Ages about to be extinguished by Norsemen. These transformations, or forkings, are daring; they also make tough going for a first-time reader. Yet when Ben, near the end of the novel, thinks that "the short view alone is bearable," we agree with him, partly because of the long views Mr. Updike takes in his narrative. -- The Wall Street Journal, William H. Pritchard

Updike allows his protagonist some extensive theorizing about his alternate worlds. But, as with the oddly sporadic presentation of a post-nuclear future, we sense that the author is pointing elsewhere.... This makes for some fairly dry work. The balance between giving life to a story and talking at it leans to the side of talk--particularly since it is hard to provide vital distinctness to alternate worlds when you suggest that they may be mental constructs.... Yet, seen not for themselves but as part of Turnbull's aging struggle, the fantasy alternate worlds are truly affecting. Stripped of vitality and power, the failing protagonist makes a final grab for command by using the loopy metaphors of physics to declare reality for the cloudiness of his mind and desires. In his rage against the "dying of the light," he elevates the imminent end of his particular time into the astrophysical hypothesis of the End of Time. -- Los Angeles Times Sunday Book Review, Richard Eder

About this edition

• Publisher: Penguin
• Publication date: 1998
• ISBN 10: 0140271422
• ISBN 13: 9780140271423
• Binding: Paperback
• Edition number: 1
• Number of pages: 352