Updike Redux

...He has made no effort, for example, to imagine his way into the generation he is writing about...

...It provides so dark and vivid an image of senescence that it was quite a relief to see Updike himself on public television's Charlie Rose Show the week of the book's publication, looking enviably fit and chipper, even giggly...

...The enfant terrible Updike of the early 1950s novels has metamorphosed into the dirty old man of the recent work: inevitably, perhaps, but surprisingly gracefully, and maintaining in the process a very high level of spirit, imagination and audacity...

...Does it follow, then, that Ben Tumbull is John Updike, thinly disguised...

...In general it works, though Updike has an annoying habit of writing in accordance with the conceit when it suits his purpose and entirely dropping it when it does not...

...This imagined act initiates an extended segment of the novel where reality and fantasy mingle...

...those who share them have, it seems to me, fallen for the bait set out by the infernally clever and devious Updike, who proves with this memorable novel that he is still very much at the top of his form...

...Ben does not begrudge the payments...

...In her place, Ben has taken into the house a young prostitute, Deirdre, whom he equates with the hunted deer...

...He sees his own decay and return to nothingness reflected everywhere in the blasted but mindlessly self-renewing earth around him...

...Squirrels, rats, deer, the last rhinos and cheetahs...

...While deploring Gloria's wish to kill—"I hate it when our human attempts to inflict order upon the land bring death and pain and mutilation to these innocents"—he entertains his own sadistic fantasies about the deer: "To stick a pin into that bulging eye—that would be a wicked thrill, a tunnel into another world...

...For sheer beauty of language, for opulence and luster of prose, Updike remains unequaled in his generation of American writers and also, so far, in the next...

...We are the herders of our bodies, which are beasts as dumb and bald and repugnant as cattle...

...Although wholly self-absorbed, Ben redeems himself to a certain extent by his perfect willingness to accept the fact that he is a low form of life, lower than either Deirdre or the deer...

...By daylight she pumps me full of vitamins and advice as if to prolong my life but I know her dreams' truth: She wants me and the deer both dead...

...Because it is the beginning of the novel and we have been given no cause, as yet, to doubt Ben, we buy his paranoia...

...Ben and Deirdre's uneasy life together ends abruptly when she leaves him, saying she misses dope too much: "It takes me to another place which is the one way I feel good about myself" Ben, in a moment of honesty and self-disgust, admits the truth: "She had wanted to be more than my lewd toy, my sex object, but I had ignored this silent plea...

...It soon becomes evident, though, that Ben is duplicitous, and that this extends not only to his wife, his children and his readers, but to himself...

...A lot of people appear to think so, along with Wallace and New York Times book critic Michiko Kakutani...

...The period of his children's childhoods he rather harrowingly recognizes as having been a tragic waste, thanks to his own obsession with his work andhis sex life: "I gave them shelter and went through the motions but I remember mostly sorrow—broken bones, dead gerbils and dogs, little round faces wet with tears, a sickening river of junk food, and their sad attempt, all five of them before they passed into the secrecy of adolescence, to call me out of myself into the sunshine of their love...

...Nature continues to prove fruitful, stronger than humanity and more resourceful...

...Giona's is bridge and the garden club...

...He is moved by Deirdre's primitive and superstitious wish to attend church on Easter...

...Ben himself retains an abstract interest in theology, but inhabits a world that is touched neither by meaning nor eternity...

...Thus Ben Turnbull, the narrator of Updike's latest novel, Toward the End of Time (Knopf, 334 pp., $25.00), has moved considerably up the social ladder, is 66 years old (to Updike's 65), divorced and long since remarried, the father of five (to Updike's four), and lives in New England...

...They live in Gloria's mansion by the sea in relative security, thanks to the thugs who "protect" them in exchange for a monthly fee...

...Like so many wives in Updike's fiction, Gloria is seen by her husband as a symbol and instrument of death, and her ardent wish to kill the marauding deer who dines nightly on her euonymus hedge reinforces this image...

...Gloria is gone...

...both Gloria and his former wife were "religious aristocrats, for whom God was a vulgar poor relation with the additional social disadvantage of not existing...

...The human body, though still an object of lust, has lost for Ben any association it might once have had with beauty or grace: "I undress my body, shower it, dress it again, in slightly different clothes...

...Rendered impotent, finally, by a prostatectomy, Ben does not so much mourn his lost prowess as marvel at his former life: "How could so superfluous an appendage ever have served as the hub of my universe...

...Writers & Writing UPDIKE REDUX By Brooke Allen Like Philip Roth, his fellow phallocrat (to use a term David Foster Wallace let fly in the New York Observer during a recent demolition job on a group of aging fiction writers), John Updike has a provocative habit of inventing protagonists who bear transparent resemblances to himself...

...Toward the End of Time is a book about old age, about the fruitless human effort, if not to stop or deflect the motion of time, to endow it at the very least with some meaning...

...For Updike, as for so many other authors, the device of setting the novel in the future is useful chiefly as a way of speaking about the present...

...The feverish suburban polygamy that broke up Ben's marriage with his first wife (named, a little too obviously, Perdita), is far more characteristic of the '50s and '60s, when Ben was still a child, than of the '80s...

...A retired broker, Ben visits his grandchildren, plays bitterly contended rounds of golf with his buddies Red and Ken, and coexists in a state of uneasy truce with the gorgeous and imposing Gloria...

...His recreation is golf...

...Has Ben really killed her...

...By no Stretch of the imagination can one picture Ben and Gloria relaxing of an evening to the music of what is supposed to be their own generation: Van Morrison or Aretha Franklin or even the Beatles...

...I had failed to take seriously her instinctive attempt, this last month, at spring cleaning, so inflexibly had I consigned her and our life together to the category of squalor...

...the thugs take less, after all, than the old government extracted "for its wars and universal medical care, its mad schemes of spaceships in the sky and equal opportunity for everyone...

...Wallace castigated Updike for being a narcissistic solipsist, and went on to declare that no intelligent reader under 40, particularly no woman, can stand him...

...The Federal government still exists, but "the President and the legislators down in Washington have as little control over our lives as the Roman emperors in the fifth Christian century did over the populations of Iberia or Thrace...

...He has hung on to his money and to the substantial wealth of his second wife, a New England aristocrat...

...He is brutally honest about his failures as a husband (twice), and as a father...

...A futuristic foray, Toward the End of Time is set in the year 2020, in a world markedly different from that of 1997...

...Kakutani more or less equated the cold, self-involved, misogynistic Turnbull with the author in her Times review...

...She dreams at night of my death, and when she awakens, in her guilty consciousness she gives my body a hug that shatters my own desirous dreams...

...It turns out she is only away on an expedition with her women's club...

...Insects, of course, in their undismayable selfless multitudes...

...Anyone less like the emotionally burdened Ben Turnbull could hardly be imagined...

...Ben Turnbull has survived the war and financial crash better than most...

...Mexico, which remained neutral, has become the land of opportunity for the poor and unemployed of the United States and, taking advantage of its war-torn northern neighbor's befuddlement, has reclaimed Southern California, New Mexico and Texas...

...Each struggling insect is a metaphor for his own "minuscule, clinging, transitory, insectlike life...

...Neither an illusion nor a God eases the approach of old age and death for Ben...

...My wife is a killer," Ben says...

...He professes himself unwilling to borrow the neighbor's shotgun, but once it is in the house he can't resist telling Gloria when the deer is in sight, can't resist provoking her into shooting at the helpless beast...

...And after Ben has what amounts to a minibreakdown, his fantasy is that he himself is the agent of death, that he himself wheels around with the shotgun and shoots, not the deer, but Gloria...

...there is still other life...

...He seemed not at all ashamed by the slap in the face he has dealt sensitive feminists in inventing a protagonist, who while not unsympathetic, nevertheless deflowers a pubescent girl, dreams of killing his wife, and fantasizes about spying on his zaftig daughter-in-law as she sits on the toilet...

...Flora, too, proliferates almost obscenely in the Turnbulls' garden and the surrounding forest...

...America, though less damaged than Asia, has suffered the collapse of its infrastructure and the transformation of its society into every-man-for-himself, Wild West chaos...

...Ben was born in the 1950s, some 20 years after his creator, yet there is nothing of the baby boomer in him and everything of the prototypical mid20th-century Updike-man...

...On this scorched planet we human beings are not yet quite alone...

...Such reactions are predictable, almost knee-jerk...

...The Commonwealth of Massachusetts, where Ben and Gloria Turnbull reside, runs its affairs independently of Washington and even circulates its own currency, the welder, named for "a fabled prewar governor, a rare Republican...

...Nuclear war between China and the United States has caused a precipitous population decline everywhere and devastated significant portions of the globe...