Toward the End of Time: A Novel (udgave 1998)

The best part of this book is the description of the transformations in the protagonist's garden through one year. Beautiful prose. Misogynistic, yes, but also gives valuable insights into an older man's thoughts (Updike's generation). ( )

nothing likeable about these characters. very bleak story. not my cup of tea. ( )

http://nwhyte.livejournal.com/2117940.html

A depressing, miserable piece of whining. Author who hasn't done much sf writes a post-apocalypse novel where the decline of society mirrors the narrator's the decline into old age, and thinks it's something special. Avoid. ( )

John Updike, considered by many to be one the greatest American novelists of the twentieth century, died January 27, 2009. He had published more than fifty novels and numerous short stories (usually in the New Yorker magazine where he was a long-time contributor). Updike was most well-known for Couples and his series of novels with Harold Angstrom as "hero" - Rabbit, Run; Rabbit Redux; Rabbit Is Rich; Rabbit At Rest - an extraordinary rendition of the ordinary - with his recurring themes of middle-class Americans and sex. Our library has two of the Rabbit series - Rabbit is Rich and Rabbit at Rest, two other novels (The Centaur and the recently acquired Toward the End of Time) as well as a book of short stories, Picked-Up Pieces.
Recently reading Toward the End of Time, I was captivated by it, to the point of agreeing to do this book review (something I usually avoid like the plague). I think what I enjoyed was a combination of form and substance. First the form – his « painterly eye ». Updike wanted to be a cartoonist when younger and after a degree in English from Harvard, spent a year as an art student in Oxford. His powers of description are exquisite in this book, especially with landscape and the weather. The substance, the story, appears at first to be very Updikishly traditional. The protagonist, Ben Turnbull, is a not particularly sympathetic older middle-class American man fairly obsessed by sex and his mortality. The story is set in Massachusetts – traditional Updike territory. But we discover little by little that although written in 1997, the story is set in 2020, after a war with China. There are still golf courses, but no dollars. People are sneaking over the Mexican border INTO Mexico as economic refugees. FedEx is taking over many functions of government. The book could be described as postmodern semi-science fiction.
If you want to know what Updike thinks--and believes--about life, the universe, and everything, it's all here, a blend of observations on nature, reflections on science, ruminations on history, and a description of the aging process (from the male point of view). This novel may not be Updike's best, but Margaret Atwood wrote a very positive review of it for the New York Times entitled "Memento Mori--But First, Carpe Diem."
Once you've read a little Updike, you might want listen to him. He gave many interviews which are available on the internet - on the BBC programme FrontRow in 2008, for instance - at http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/americas/7854554.stm

Toward the End of Time is the second John Updike book I've read (The Centaur being the first). I didn't like this nearly as much. Updike is an intellectual read any way you cut it and maybe it's not best to read this book in drips and dribbles (yes...that's an allusion to one of the issues the main character has in the book).

Anyway, Updike jumps back and forth through time with his character - whether it's all in the character's head it's up to the reader to decide. The jumping back and forth can be disorientating - but perhaps that was part of the goal. ( )