Toward the End of Time: A Novel [Paperback]

John Updike (Author)

Book Description

Release date: August 25, 1998

Set in the near future of 2020, this disconcerting philosophical fantasy depicts an America devastated by a war with China that has left its populace decimated, its government a shambles, and its natural resources tainted. The hero is Ben Turnbull, a sixty-six-year-old retired investment counselor, who, like Thoreau, sticks close to home and traces the course of one Massachusetts year in his journal. Something of a science buff, he finds that his disrupted personal history has been warped by the disjunctions and vagaries of the “many-worlds” hypothesis derived from the indeterminacy of quantum theory. His identity branches into variants extending back through the past and forward into the evolution of the universe, as both it and his own mortal, nature-haunted existence move toward the end of time.

Editorial Reviews

From Library Journal

Updike again, understandably autumnal in his 18th novel and 48th book. It's 2020, and war with China has left the United States in a shambles. As cheerfully retired investment counselor Ben Turnbull gets caught up in the "many-universes" theory resulting from the indeterminacy of quantum mechanics, he finds his identity racing back and forth in time.
Copyright 1997 Reed Business Information, Inc. --This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title.

From Booklist

This is Updike's millennium novel. Who better than he--vastly intelligent observer of morals and mores over the past half-century--to wrap up fin de siecle life in one, big, magnificent novel that both concludes and foresees? But what a disappointment! It's set in the future--2020, to be exact. What is the point of setting the story ahead in time while at the same time giving next to no feel that things are different? A war is supposed to have happened between the U.S. and China, but it seems to have had as little effect on daily life as some small skirmish in Somalia. Ben Turnbull narrates a year in his life; he's in his late sixties, a semiretired investor, a lover of science. He and his wife have arguments over a deer who is nibbling her lawn and garden away; Ben has thoughts about science, which he yammers on and on about to the absolute distraction of the follower of this curious narrative. Ben thinks he has shot his wife instead of the deer, and the deer turns into a young woman, with whom he has an affair, but, clank, reality sets in again, and his wife is back. Huh? Even Updike's gorgeous style cannot jump-start this plot; it's gone lame at the starting gate. Still, his legion of fans will want to decide for themselves. Brad Hooper --This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title.

See all Editorial Reviews

Product Details

• Paperback: 352 pages
• Publisher: Random House Trade Paperbacks (August 25, 1998)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0449000419
• ISBN-13: 978-0449000410
• Product Dimensions: 0.9 x 5.2 x 7.9 inches
• Shipping Weight: 10.2 ounces (View shipping rates and policies)
• Average Customer Review: 3.8 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (57 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #1,377,598 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

More About the Author

John Updike was born in 1932, in Shillington, Pennsylvania. He graduated from Harvard College in 1954, and spent a year in Oxford, England, at the Ruskin School of Drawing and Fine Art. From 1955 to 1957 he was a member of the staff of The New Yorker, and since 1957 lived in Massachusetts. He was the father of four children and the author of more than fifty books, including collections of short stories, poems, essays, and criticism. His novels won the Pulitzer Prize (twice), the National Book Award, the National Book Critics Circle Award, the Rosenthal Award, and the Howells Medal. A previous collection of essays, Hugging the Shore, received the 1983 National Book Critics Circle Award for criticism. John Updike died on January 27, 2009, at the age of 76.

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

8 of 8 people found the following review helpful

3.0 out of 5 stars Sometimes a Joy, Sometimes a Chore September 3, 2006

By Scott William Foley VINE™ VOICE

Format:Paperback

John Updike's Toward the End Of Time proved a bit of an enigma to me. At times I thoroughly enjoyed it and at other times I seriously thought about putting the book down, never to open its contents again.

In the novel our protagonist goes by the name of Ben Turnbull, a retired finance expert who now haunts his home in the country as his wife obsesses with the garden, her social circles, and a gift shop she helps run. The year is 2020, and a war with the Chinese has all but obliterated the United States as we currently know it. However, New England has been little affected and so life is fairly normal.

Perhaps that is Updike's most astonishing talent. Amongst all the mundane aspects of his tale, he'll sometimes throw in facts about the war, or briefly mention a new life form that has emerged as a result of the war, or slip into metaphysical dissertations about all aspects of science that will virtually boggle your mind. Along with that, at times Ben, our narrator, will slip into . . . something . . . where he is someone totally different living in ancient Egypt or soon after the death of Christ. Perhaps just as flummoxing is the disappearance and reemergence of major characters with little to no explanation.

Amidst all this, however, exist the story of a man aging, a man who feels useless to his wife and to himself more and more with each passing day. He is a man still hot with passion for life and for love, but he finds fulfillment for these passions in the most unusual and sometimes immoral of places.

While this novel presented itself as a constant frustration, one cannot ignore the sheer talent Updike has at imagery. Ben's wife's garden is described in the utmost detail, and there are many, many metaphors as the garden is constantly torn asunder and the local wildlife exterminated in favor of the garden's survival for Ben's slow but sure demise and for his strained relationship with his wife.

If you are a fan of Updike and want to explore more of his interesting styles and techniques, you would probably enjoy this work very much. However, if you are a casual reader looking for a new book, I don't think you would enjoy this particular work.

~Scott William Foley, author of Souls Triumphant

16 of 21 people found the following review helpful

1.0 out of 5 stars How do you reconcile yourself with the inevitable? December 14, 1999

By A Customer

Format:Paperback

Do you judge a book by its literary merit (or at least by how well it is written, how adequately the writer uses literary devices etc.) or by its effect on you, however subjective? Because then, the marks I would give the book would be at opposite ends of the grading scale.

I see Ben, the writer of the journal, as not only a misogynist but almost a misanthropist. He speaks with more depth of feeling about animals and plants around him than about his fellow humans. I see a man toward the end of his own personal time, cynical, desperate and without a trace of gratitude for the mere fact that he is still alive.

His relationship with his grandchildren does not go beyond an evolutionary psychologist's explanation for why we feel any kind of affinity for our next of kin. In fact everything Ben does or feels seems to be reduced to a series of natural processes. Quite early on in his life, while his first wife is expecting their fifth child,(which in itself is significant, the wife reduced to or having induced upon herself the role of breeder, another natural process), Ben feels trapped. This fifth pregnancy feels 'stale', 'a stunt stained with nature's fatality'. The prospect of this new birth '...underlined the passing nature of all our mortal arrangements'. For Ben the only escape from this existentialist cul-de-sac is to start having a string of affairs or liaisons which make him alive again 'in that moment of constant present emergency in which animals healthily live'. And I wonder, is this what the struggle between culture/civilisation and nature boils down to? That culture serves to keep a check on our primal urges? But they are what ultimately defines us and sustains us?

The fear that I felt paralyzing me while reading the book was not that of death but that at the age of 65 or thereabouts, if we are honest enough to look inside ourselves, what we find that we have become is this: cynical, lewd and leacherous, flesh haters trying to defile what we can no longer ever be again. That we have become isolated pathetic little egos, socially interacting with but having no real contanct with our fellow humans. That we become emotionally impotent long before any physical impotence befalls us, as it did Ben at the end of the book. But I feel no pity for him, just a deep sickening aversion for him and the culture that he represents. And how can you feel otherwise for someone for whom life is but 'a mild misery'?

3 of 3 people found the following review helpful

3.0 out of 5 stars Two stars for technical mastery, one for the cover November 20, 1998

By A Customer

Format:Hardcover

Please. This novel is a fragmented, floral fulmination on prostate troubles. Someone said that Updike's style is lapidary and I agree: his sentences are precise and elegant but, taken altogether, the parts still outshine the sum. The Sci fi setting is silly and irrelevant, the historical digressions are good but what the heck are they supposed to prove? Are they just Turnbull's flights of fancy? Is this diary convincing? Could a financial investor write such elegant prose? If so, wouldn't he realize that he'd missed his callling? I know I'm being cynical, but this is a frustrating novel. I wanted to like the story but simply couldn't. I'd love to see Updike develop the story about the author of Mark's Gospel. That would be a great read. He had the voice down pat. By the way, the metallobugs (or whatever) was a bit over the top, although, come to think of it, so was the whole premise that a guy could worry about golf and flora and getting laid in a post nuclear world. Good Gad!!