Toward the End of Time

By John Updike
Alfred A. Knopf, $25

ISBN 0375400060

Review by Robert Weibezahl

John Updike, long our most transcendent witness to the moral turpitude of the country club set, has become a lion in winter, raging against the ignominy of old age and the inevitable decline of civilization in his new novel, "Toward the End of Time." It is a beautifully written and fascinating book, in many ways everything we have come to expect from Updike. In many other ways, it is not.

It is a beautifully written book, in many ways everything we have come to expect from Updike. In many other ways, it is not.

The novel is set in the not-too-distant future of 2020, in a suburban America that closely resembles our own, but for a few not insignificant features. This is a post-war world, with half the world's population depleted after a brutal war between the U.S. and China. In a well-heeled community north of Boston (New England has been spared the virtual annihilation of the West and Midwest), Ben Turnbull, a self-described "useless old lecherous" man, lives in comfortable retirement. As the novel opens, his main concerns are satisfying his still-healthy libido and mollifying his garden-obsessed second wife, Gloria, as she wages war against an intruding deer.

As the year progresses -- and "Toward the End of Time" is essentially a year's worth of informal journal entries -- Ben sifts through events both mundane and extraordinary, as he staves off his horror of aging. Beneath its rather tranquil veneer it is a strange new world, where thugs demand protection money, non-organic life forms ravage the landscape, and menacing children think nothing of bludgeoning a rival to death. Ben takes much of this in stride with rather astonishing equanimity. He even abets the young hoodlums at one point, almost as a private act of reprisal for all of the buttoned-down civility he has been forced to endure for his 66 years.

On a deeper level, "Toward the End of Time" pushes well beyond its admittedly disturbing plot. Updike is playing with quantum theory and with intricate cosmological notions of time's unraveling. There are shifts throughout the novel, unexpected and unexplained, where Ben becomes St. Mark the evangelist, arguing theology with St. Paul, or a doomed monk at Lindisfarne awaiting certain death at the hands of Viking marauders. These jaunts to western civilization's mileposts are fodder for Ben's ruminations on religion, nature and mortality. And they are among the finer moments in a complex and thoughtful book.

There is little disagreement that Updike is one of our most important writers, one who will be read well beyond the year 2020 (actually, Updike here provides his own humorous, if dire prediction about the future of fiction -- at the expense of John Grisham -- but I won't spoil it for you by quoting it here). Some with his accomplishments would be content resting on their laurels, assured of some measure of literary immortality. Not Updike, who has undertaken a daring fictional experiment.

Lyrical, nostalgic, indeed elegiac, aspects of "Toward the End of Time" intimate that Updike may have reached the end of his fictional journey. Let's hope not.

Robert Weibezahl lives in Los Angeles, where he writes about books and culture.

©1997, ProMotion, inc.

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