Detailed item info | Synopsis | Updike's 18th novel is an apocalyptic view of the future that takes place in the year 2020, after a nuclear war with China that has reduced American politics and government to rival bands of itinerant warlords. Ben Turnbull lives in a well-to-do suburb of Boston with his wife Gloria and their five children. They pay protection money in lieu of taxes, and manage to live a normal enough life, one that has room for the Updikean themes of infidelity, despair, ennui, and nostalgia.
| | Size | | Length: | 334 pages | | Height: | 8.5 in. | | Width: | 5.5 in. | | Thickness: | 1.5 in. | | Weight: | 17.6 oz. |
| | Publisher's Note | 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.
Ben Turnbull, the hero of John Updikes 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.
| | Industry reviews | "In the midst of life we are in death: 'Toward the End if Time,' surely Mr.Updike's most death-haunted work of fiction, is by same token fully in the midst of life, especially the life of language, so strongly evident on each of its pages."
Wall Street Journal - William H. Pritchard (10/08/1997)
"Never less than readable, but not nearly the book it might have been. Minor Updike."
Demos
"A grim but brilliantly imaginative tale."
Kakutani
One of the several new and exciting paths Updike takes in this magnificent new novel is its futuristic setting the year 2020, after the Sino-American Conflict has destroyed the government, rendered the Great Plains a radioactive dustbowl and left the management of local affairs to thugs who demand protection money. Yet so subtly is this information introduced into the narrative that what remains paramount is not what has changed in this dangerous new world (although Updike imagines its particulars with brilliant specificity) but what has remained the same: the edgy relationship between the sexes, the wax and wane of the seasons, the pull of love and guilt between generations. Narrator Ben Turnbull begins his story on a snowy November day when a deer that is ravaging his property in coastal Massachusetts becomes the target of his ruthlessly efficient wife Gloria's zeal to eradicate what she cannot tame. In segues of time slippage, Ben imagines himself in other eras of history when brute force destroys civilization: among Egyptian grave robbers, as a monk of Lindisfarne slaughtered by Norse marauders, as a Nazi guard in a concentration camp. In more mundane moments, he enjoys sexual romps with the w**** Deirdre, who may or may not be a metamorphosed deer, just as Gloria may or may not be dead. (She is not and Deirdre decamps.) Meanwhile, some tough kids take up residence on the property and extort money, and a spectral torus glows in the sky. As the months pass precisely observed by Ben in detailed, loving descriptions of the flora and fauna of each season the tone of the book grows more ominous until, sure enough, a lawless incursion of cancer cells invades Ben's body. Updike's prose is as ever lush, lyrical and yet poetically precise. His control never wavers as Ben surveys the sorry state of the world in matter-of-fact terms, and the state of his libido, his relationships with Gloria, his children and his proliferating grandchildren in more agitated reflections. As Ben confronts the looming certainty that time is running out for him and for the universe, the narrative sweeps to a bittersweet conclusion befitting a book that has all the hallmarks of a classic. 75,000 first printing; BOMC main selection. (Oct.)
Publishers Weekly (08/04/1997)
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