Customer Reviews

Toward the End of Time

5 star:		(20)
4 star:		(15)
3 star:		(11)
2 star:		(7)
1 star:		(3)

 

 

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

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'?

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!!

I approached this book with eagerness and enthusiasm as it was the first book I read of this supposed 'master'. Updike is a master of the English language, that is indisputable. As can be evidenced by the seemingly endless and painfully deatiled descriptions of flowers and landscape, he must also be close to being an authority in horticulture. And surely he must have written better works in the past, since barring the Updike signature, he would have never made it past a junior editor with this one. What a drag. It took me months to finish this one, since I would fall asleep every second page. I only finished it because I could not believe he would have written that many pages essentially leading up to nothing. I must stop before I start swearing again for having so supremely wasted my time reading this self-serving compilation of words.

This novel deals with aging and our own sense of mortality. The world Updike describes, as well as his main character, are both groaning under the strain of age and decay. In this dysfunctional (yet realistically drawn) future, Updike allows his magically realistic imagination to float free. Not really science fiction--although the background is a not too distant future. More of a philosophical and thoughtful novel that looks at our broken humanity from several different vantage points and carefully, wonderfully, and somewhat terrifyingly looks at the moments leading up to our decay and ultimate end of life.

I want to say "classic Updike" but this novel is only my second Updike read, so that summary would be somewhat presumptuous. Updike shows a great talent in not only crafting a story, but also crafting a scene. It's easy to get caught up in the senses of Toward The End of Time - colours, smells and textures - while innocently losing sight of the developing plot. Add to this the historical and scientific tangents Updike takes the reader on, suddenly, as if quickly exiting a freeway then merging back on again down the road. These words only add to the experience. For those readers for whom Updike is one of their parent's favourite authors, like mine, then I would recommend this book. Mom and Dad are right.

wow... just finished it, and can i just say that this is one of those books i have finished out of spite alone, so i can say the book didn't get the better of me.
i have heard john updike described as "a penis with a thesaurus", and i can tell you this book illustrates that comment perfectly. if you are not averse to reading pages devoted to golf games, or accounts of an aging man doting on his penis for paragraphs on end, read this book because it delivers. there are short bursts of beauty, but it is all so incredibly brief and so quickly disregarded that it is irritating more than engaging. so self-indulgent, so crass - - i have also heard it said about the author, concerning his overexposure in the literary world, that "the new yorker seems to publish everything but his income taxes". i think he pieces together a few things, throws it all into a manuscript and says "here you go", evidenced by the great ideas he presents, and does nothing with. For example, FedEx taking over the government, a moon-sized manned satellite abandoned by the people on earth, the fallout after a "sino-american conflict"... a more competent writer could work absolute wonders with these ideas i feel, and he just seems content to mention them in passing and describe ad nauseam his long-term trist with a foul-mouthed crack whore, or his second wife's flower beds over and over and over and over again. john updike is written proof that if you are a sexist, classist prick with a single influential novel, a big vocabulary and a bit of money, you can turn out endless amounts of crap and people will eat it up.

Although I have the Rabbit books, I haven't read them yet, so my only exposure to Updike so far has been this book and the Centaur. After reading both books I find I really like his style, hyperdetailed and flowing at the same time, his gift for description can carry even the most static scenes along. Which helps because this novel is all static scenes. It's the journal of Ben Turnbull who is growing old in the year 2020, in a US which has been devastated by war with China but doesn't seem all that much different, and uses his journal to meditate on all sorts of things, from his squabbles with his wife to (apparently) pretending he's different people during different periods of history. The charactization of Turnbull is excellent and throughout the book the reader really gets a feel for him, even as he keeps trying to slip away behind babbling about physics and being one of the guys who wrote the Gospel, his relationship with his wives and children are nicely sketched out and pull no punches, alternatively showing him in a good and bad light. The plot can best be described as episodic, things mostly happen and Turnbull comments on them . . . though Updike does a nice job of playing with the perceptions of the reader, since the novel is entirely subjective the reader only can go by what Turnbull tells them, leading to questions to how reliable he is. But then, since there's little rising action, the mystery makes little difference other as an academic exercise. Still kind of fun, though. Much like the Centaur, Updike loves to pull those oh so literary tricks of having his wife vanish, some other woman replace her with a sort of muffled explanation and then have his wife reappear with an equally muffled explanation, along with having the narrative mostly stop completely to incorporate vaguely relevant asides. The historical asides are nice as well, though they can surprising because some of the journal entries slide right into them without warning . . . I'm not sure what the purpose of those are, though they are entertaining and different. Perhaps Updike wanted to spice the novel up a bit. In the end though it's both Updike's at times stunningly beautiful descriptions (especially of landscape and weather) and his detailing of Ben Turnbull and his relationships to the various people he knows that form the core of the novel and ultimately decide how much you'll enjoy it. For the most part it's a book you experience more than decipher, one that poses more questions than it answers and when it ends, you'll find yourself a bit older (unless you read really fast, I guess) with perhaps a few more thoughts to ponder. Not a pulse pounding page turner, but gripping in its own way nonetheless.

The time is the not-too-distant future after a brief and devastating nuclear exchange between the U.S. and China. The book's main character is an aging and not-very-likable sex-obsessed retiree named Ben Turnbull who is sinking into a depressed and depressing old age. Beautifully written and very readable, as you would expect from one of America's most accomplished writers, but the overall tone is very dark. Ben's world was not a world I enjoyed being in very much. (Why is John Updike always so obsessed with the sexual lives of his characters?)

Toward The End of Time made the New York Times's "Notable Books" list for '97, but never really got the attention it deserves. Although set in the near future (the year 2020 should be a tip-off that Updike is having some fun with this device) the book is focused very much on the here-and-now as experienced by Ben Turnbull, an aging investment adviser whose wife may be trying to kill him, or may herself be dead; who may or may not be having an interesting and oddly touching affair with a local prostitute; and who seems to be advising a group of local hoodlums on how best to shake down the neighbors. What Ben is certainly doing is confronting his own mortality: from the opening lines, in which winter comes far too early to the north shore of Massachusetts, to the closing moments, in which, one year later, a sudden burst of warm weather stirs a midwinter flurry of insect life, Ben immerses himself in a sensual awareness of the physical world even as his thoughts seem to travel back through time, lighting on the defining moments of an unusual cast of characters. Whether a reader is jarred by these sudden digressions to ancient Egypt, Nazi Germany, and elsewhere will depend in large part on whether he or she enters into the spirit of the novel, which is ultimately impressionistic, despite its surfeit of detail. In my view Updike works wonders--who else will see the world for us this clearly and render it into such perfect prose? Add to that his subtle but resonant sense of humor (the prevailing unit of currency is dubbed the "welder," after Massachusetts governor Bill Weld; in the absence of a strong central government following a brief nuclear war with China, Federal Express has begun to assert order) and his evermore masterful chronicling of the tensions between men and women, and this novel emerges as one of his very best. Although in many respects Ben Turnbull's life closely resembles Updike's, let's hope that the author is not near the end of his time; clearly, miraculously, his powers continue to bloom.