Criticism > Contemporary Literary Criticism > Updike, John (Vol. 139) - Tom LeClair (review date 3 November 1997)

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Tom LeClair (review date 3 November 1997)

SOURCE: “Deer John,” in Nation, November 3, 1997, pp. 62–3.

[In the following review, LeClair offers a positive assessment of Toward the End of Time.]

After putting Rabbit to rest, John Updike ranged far abroad in Brazil and drilled deep into history in Memories of the Ford Administration and In the Beauty of the Lilies. While these were adventurous novels, I think Updike missed his long-running index to the American present and decided that Rabbit's end was untimely. In Toward the End of Time, Updike replaces the once poor, finally rich and always sex-obsessed Rabbit with a similar character, Ben Turnbull. At 67, Turnbull has outlived Rabbit by eleven years but in that extra time has lost emotional contact with his numerous progeny, developed prostate cancer, been deprived of golf and come to suspect that his wife wants him dead.

About once a decade some...

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1. Introduction
2. Principal Works
3. Criticism
   1. Joseph Epstein (essay date January 1983)
   2. Gail Godwin (review date 4 June 1984)
   3. Katha Pollitt (review date 23 June 1984)
   4. D. J. Enright (review date 2 February 1987)
   5. Edward Abbey (review date 28 March 1987)
   6. Richard Gilman (review date 20 June 1988)
   7. Denis Donoghue (review date 5 March 1989)
   8. Elizabeth Hardwick (review date 18 May 1989)
   9. John F. Fleischauer (essay date Summer 1989)
   10. Victor K. Lasseter (essay date October 1989)
   11. George J. Searles (review date 1–15 October 1990)
   12. Anthony Quinn (review date 26 October 1990)
   13. Barbara Leckie (essay date Spring 1991)
   14. Matthew Wilson (essay date Spring 1991)
   15. Martin Amis (review date 10 November 1991)
   16. Barbara Kingsolver (review date 6 February 1994)
   17. John Bayley (review date 12 May 1994)
   18. Jay Parini (review date 6 November 1994)
   19. Julian Barnes (review date 28 January 1996)
   20. A. O. Scott (review date 12 February 1996)
   21. Margaret Atwood (review date 12 October 1997)
   22. Tom LeClair (review date 3 November 1997)
   23. Robert Boyers (review date 17 November 1997)
   24. James Shapiro (review date 25 October 1998)
4. Further Reading
5. Copyright

1. John Updike