SOURCE: “Bullets of Milk,” in New Republic, November 17, 1997, pp. 38–42.

[In the following review, Boyers gives an unfavorable assessment of Toward the End of Time.]

John Updike's new novel [, Toward the End of Time,] is set in the year 2020, not long after a brief but devastating war in which millions of American and Chinese citizens were killed. We see none of this killing, and we are told nothing of the causes that led to the war or that brought it to a close. Occasional references are made to the resultant aftermath to a collapsed national economy and deteriorating office buildings, to a “depopulated” Midwest and abandoned neighborhoods; but we do not tour those neighborhoods or feel in any way the effects of the reported disaster. A passing reference to Chinese missiles, or to Mexico as a golden land of opportunity, will remind us that something consequential has happened, that the world out there is a place different in many ways from the world of 1997. But in virtually every respect the local world in which Updike immerses us is our—or rather, his—familiar world. It is not at all surprising to the reader of this novel that for Updike's eloquent alter ego, Ben Turnbull, “the collapse of civilization” amounts to little more than an inspiring rise in “the quality of young women who are becoming whores.”

A retired investment counsellor with a large extended family living nearby in the Boston area, Turnbull is neither an idiot nor a monster. He is 66, and his depravities are practiced on a modest scale. He is as susceptible as the next man to twinges of remorse and pity; or so we are to believe. If the collapse of civilization seems to him remote, it is in part because his routine preoccupations and his immediate prospects have been little affected by the conflagration. When he speaks, casually, of “rapacity, competition, desperation, death to other living things” as “the forces that make the world go around,” he is repeating a settled conviction that took root in him long before the recent disastrous events. He did not need reports of “the plains [as] a radioactive dust bowl” to instruct him on “the forces that make the world go around.”

It matters to Ben very little, so far as we can tell, that the dollar is worthless, for in its place he spends a “scrip” issued by “corporations, states and hotel chains,” and he can apparently buy whatever he wants, from private security guards to gardening supplies, from gasoline to Federal Express service. When he is ill, he drives to Boston from his suburban home to see a doctor, and he receives first-rate treatment at a hospital. He visits his grandchildren, attends parties, and carves turkeys precisely as he would have done if no apocalypse had occurred. For such a person, war and change are things that happen to other people. None of his children are said to have been lost or threatened by the nuclear exchange, and his eleven grandchildren would seem to face only the garden varieties of rapacity and desperation that fall to each of us.

Updike betrays no anxiety about the glaring inadequacy of his novel as an account of drastic political and social upheaval. He places his narrative in the hands, in the voice, of a man who sees what Updike usually sees. Turnbull is a bright man who can be counted on to say bright things in a language so precise and so fluent that he often reminds us of his creator. And he, too, has the habit of lingering for a time in the ample forests of his own prose. He reads books, entertains theories, and argues with himself about the status of virtue and the Nietzschean notion of ressentiment. He has little patience for actual politics, and he likes to retreat efficiently from troubling questions to manageable problems. These are tendencies of his temperament that Updike has no wish to condemn.

Ben Turnbull is a guide to nothing but the vagaries of his own frequently compelling intelligence. He acknowledges the facts of political reality much in the way that he examines more proximate facts, with a cool empathy, an almost aesthetic detachment. He is more than a little dreamy, eager to lose himself in “cosmic feeling” and to ride the surfaces of life for their “transcendent sparkle.” He is more comfortable speaking about entropy than about hope or action. When he recites the facts—this happened, then that, then that—he is already pulling back from the thicknesses of history, drawing around himself a circle of certainty within which existence proceeds as it must, without the possibility that events in the great world will drastically disrupt his security and his routine.

He knows, of course, that events do sometimes disrupt, and that lives have been destroyed, or ended, as a result of particular conflicts. He registers changes in society; but for all his acute powers of observation, he has little sense of society as a contention of forces in which individual will and intelligence may often play a significant role. He knows how to hurt and to flatter, how to give and to resist, how to get on in the world; but he feels that he can no more control the local, small-scale forces impinging on his life than he can control the forces governing the nuclear exchange between China and the United States. He is a very observant quietist, whose passivity is the condition of his acuity. Amused that anyone would presume to learn or to grow by studying the world, he swells with a cruel satisfaction when he tells his young hooker-mistress “that I don't much care what happens in the world. … What Spin and Phil and the kids from Lynn do with the world is up to them. I just want to buy a little peace, day by day.”

In the course of his retirement on a small but comfortable property not far from Boston, Turnbull is visited by a bunch of sleazy racketeers offering to sell him protection. Collectors for “local crime overlords,” they are likened to “old-style” movie actors; and Updike is so in thrall to their banal cinematic features—one “rolls around in his mouth” a trademark toothpick, another issues sick threats “with a quick hitch in his shoulders”—that he is unable to invest them with even a trace of genuine malice or menace. The federal government can no longer protect its citizens, and the local police are without the resources to do much. How this can have happened we are not permitted to ask. It just happened. And in the same way we must accept that the predators can be kept more or less out of one's way, so long as they are paid. They may fight among themselves, but they represent no direct threat to Turnbull's well-being. Suspicious and a little put out at first, he learns quickly to accept what is a necessary evil, and becomes increasingly curious about his protectors. Ben accepts that people do what they must do to get along, extortionists no less than homeowners. What we call social order is an arrangement we do well not to look at too closely. Curiosity about this element of that is perfectly acceptable, so long as it is not underwritten by a nagging interest in social justice.

Ben's relations with these thugs resemble his relations with most other persons. He never gets too close to anyone, though he is curious about selected aspects of wives, children, lovers, clients. His present wife Gloria seems to him now and then a killer, eager for his death or his disappearance, though she sometimes ministers to him with a puzzling ardor. A former wife, Perdita, “loyal if unenraptured,” with her “thick and rounded” soles and “little toes,” sometimes seems less a person than a pretext for recalling odd potencies and transgressions. His prostitute mistress Deirdre, a thief and a preternaturally avid sex toy with “silken rivers of dark body hair,” betrays, now and again, “as in every woman,” “the hormones of nest-building.” In all, Ben doubts most things, including his own unstable view of them. He wants from life nothing more than the same old paltry satisfactions that he derides. Now and then he wonders at “the mysteries of overplenteous life,” or (somewhat less sublimely) at “the miraculous knit of the jockey underpants stretched across [his] knees” as he sits on the toilet; but these epiphanies rarely prevent him from feeling “dull” and unresponsive.

The action of the novel is very limited. Ben stays close to home, only occasionally venturing out to the office to do a bit of work, finding few colleagues who miss him. He golfs, reads, visits his grandchildren. When his wife is away, he shares his bed with Deirdre, who stirs him up and eventually leaves him for a more exciting criminal companion. He reaches out, at first reluctantly, then more eagerly, to the band of adolescent racketeers living in a makeshift shed on the outskirts of his modest property, offering them advice on extortion and, in the end, mildly mourning their demise. His thoughts range from “the vibrant magenta of crabapple” to marriage as “a mental game of thrust and parry played on the edge of the grave.” He remembers his many failures and his frequent derelictions, but consigns almost everything in his experience to “Sisyphean repetitiveness” and “triviality.” By far the most important event in his account of himself is his bout with prostate cancer, his struggle “in a narrow wedge of space-time beneath the obliterating imminence of winter.” He issues resonant utterances about meaning and meaninglessness, about change and entropy, but he barely moves from the place he has settled in, and his special gift is to avoid “any thought that will tip [him] into depression.”

What action there is in the novel is provided by Ben's rarely sluggish imagination. His journal entries move from one sensation to another, from the smell of a crotch to the dread of humiliation, from the springy hair on the head of a half-black grandchild to the “muffled thrumming” sounding through an open storm window. Often the impressions of the visible world are mild, picturesque, reassuring: “sunlight reflected from the granite outcropping warms the earth.” A robin startled into flight, “a stuffy bird, faintly pompous in its portly movements, spoiled by the too many songs and poems unaccountably devoted to him,” is a quaint emblem, familiar, comforting, literary. Calmly attentive to every little thing, Updike's narrator is especially alert to “repositories”—“in garages and basements and closets and attics”—that “pledge our faith in eternal return,” though he is all too aware of an encroaching entropy, “when there is not a whisper, a subatomic stir, of surge.”

Still, Ben is subject to powerful surges, to panics and to nostalgias and to seizures of fervor. He lurches uncontrollably from one time plane to another, trying on identities with a promiscuous, relaxed abandon. His journal entries allow for several varieties of free association: a narrative of Egyptian grave robbers, a fragment from the life of Saint Mark, the reverie of an early Christian monk, the brutal churnings of a uniformed Nazi, a so-called “good German recruited to guard an extermination camp.” What the primary narrative lacks in tension and variety, these fragmentary narratives, with their air of peremptoriness and incompletion, of bluff yet authoritative improvisation, would seem to provide.

Yet it is Updike's sureness of touch that is generally sacrificed in these interpolations. The music of the prose remains intact, the full voice of a confident and exacting speaker recognizable even where, as in the musings of the early Christian monk, the language becomes slightly arch, the sentence structures noticeably more symmetrical, the perspective strained to accommodate “our Lord's birth of a meek virgin” and a “Providence in its miraculous patience [lending] scope so as to accumulate ungainsavable proofs toward the eternal damnation of their souls.” It is exhilarating to move, without transition, from “one busy summer day” on which “it fell to [Ben] to fuck three women” to the reflections of a monk in sackcloth about to be put to the sword; but though we are disposed to applaud the sackcloth theater, we must wonder what purpose is served by these showy fragments.

We do not require conventional transitions, which in any case Updike occasionally provides, as when the sight of a Jewish doctor, naked in a locker room, suddenly stirs Ben to contrive the sequence in the Third Reich. But the fragments do not exfoliate. They tell us nothing about Ben except that, like any literate person, he can identify briefly with people about whom he has read in books. The sequences have no urgency in the design of the novel. Updike sticks with each of them just long enough to satisfy a modest aesthetic imperative. These fragments are shapely, clever, deftly edged, and intermittently poignant, but they amount, in the end, to discrete triumphs of superfluity.

Of course, the fragments belong to Ben Turnbull, and their telling us so little about him leads us to ask what instead they may reveal about the novelist. Is “antiquity” a key to Updike's vision in a way we had not previously suspected? Probably not. No more do the words “early Christian church” or “Holocaust” provide a critical lead. If the interpolations tell us little about Ben, they tell us little about the novelist; or little that we did not know before. It is hard not to see in Ben many of the standard views and obsessions that the novelist has expressed in many other writings. Ben is by turns wise and foolish, refined and coarse, playful and tendentious. He has an eye for color, line, and form, and also a predilection for philosophical or scientific speculation. Occasionally guilty or dissatisfied, he mostly gets on with his instincts and his appetites; and he is rarely restrained by the higher moralities. He displays a sometimes disarming affection for small things, for mannerisms and foibles. Like other Updike narrators, he is good at taxonomy and elegy, and though he finds little cause for optimism, he is frequently consoled by the comely surfaces of simple things. Saddened by the theft of a fine living room rug, he brightens when “its absence exposed a maple parquet whose beauty had been long obscured.”

But Ben is most recognizably a standard Updike male in his sexual obsessions. He rightly describes himself as “like some horn-brained buck.” Ben's erotic fantasies include a decidedly sadistic component; he is turned on by thoughts of desecration and enslavement. He is regularly aroused by the exposed shoulders of a step-daughter or a glimpse of a daughter-in-law's thigh. He cannot comprehend his married son's “patently monogamous affection” for his wife: fidelity seems to him peculiar, an atavism associated with a time before the disappearance of the gods. He is perpetually in search of erotic intoxication, of inflammation and submission. The “flesh-knot” of the anus is to him a recurrent temptation, and he likes the thought that the woman who “serves [him] with a cold, slick expertise” is also a teasing, “money-grubbing cunt” who can be screwed “until she squealed for mercy.”

All of this, as Ben knows, is cast in the language of standard sexual fare, “constructed mainly of images from popular culture.” Now, for a certain kind of writer—Don DeLillo, or Robert Coover—these susceptibilities and influences would be an irresistible opportunity to probe the inner consequences of mass culture, to consider its pernicious invasion of our dreams and our desires. But Updike, who no doubt sees as clearly as anyone else what has become of us, has no wish whatever to explore this aspect of American fate. The brief observation about “popular culture” has no significant relation to anything else in the novel, and in effect serves merely to indicate that Updike himself is too clever to be entirely taken in by the language that he has given to his character. To allow Ben to follow up on his observation would be to violate an essential complacency.

To note, in passing, the origin of erotically charged language is to be smart; but to ask further questions about it might suggest that something ought to be done to liberate us from, or to make us critical of, an unfortunate susceptibility. But that would be the sort of wishful thinking in which no self-respecting realist can indulge. This satisfied sense of the dominant reality is nicely revealed in the following passage:

There is a warmth in the proximity of a man who has fucked the same woman you have. It is as if she took off her clothes as a piece of electric news she wished him to bring to you. He has heard the same soft cries, smelled the same stirred-up scent, felt the same compliant slickness, seen the same moonlit swellings and crevices and tufts—it was all in Phil's circuitry, if I could but unload it. … My sexual memories had become epics of a lost heroic age, when I was not impotent and could shoot semen into a woman's wincing face like bullets of milk. Deirdre's flanks in memory had acquired the golden immensity of temple walls rising to a cloudless sky and warmed by an Egyptian sun. Whore though he thought her, a nimbus of her holy heat clung to Phil—his oily black pubic curls had tangled with hers. …

We learn from this passage much of what is real to Updike's character. Potency is real, and the loss of potency. Scent and touch and soft cries are real, and an intimacy based upon shared physical sensation. The young man whose “public curls had tangled with [Deirdre's]” feels “indignant” when he realizes that “he mattered to [Ben] only as an emanation of our shared cunt,” but Ben has no recourse to indignation. For all his thinking, for all his reading, he is only appetite and tropism. Words such as “sacred” and “holy” and “nimbus” are to him an oil to lubricate the passage of sexual energy. His post-operative impotence is affecting because we feel that he is lost without the faculties that are most real and important to him, but Updike does not permit us to forget who and what this man is. A dark, voluptuous, obscene electric charge is carried by the erotically loaded sentences that Ben constructs. We are stirred, but also repelled, by his efforts “to drag with [his] tongue the sweet secret of [a woman's] name out of the granular dark of [his] memory cells.” And we wonder at Updike's reluctance to build into the novel any figure who might offer some resistance to Ben, who might be repelled by him as we are repelled.

But the character is most fully revealed in the way he confuses realms, swings wildly between celestial and obscene, worships “the little flesh-knot between the glassy-smooth buttocks visible in moonlight … at just the right celestial angle.” All the intermittent talk of celestial angles and tempting white church collars and “the risen Jesus” serves mainly to reveal the speaker's baffled desire for something other than what he knows and has. His is a rhetoric of disappointed love, of an obscuring, unsubstantiated ambivalence. Ben desires epiphany but he subsists on shame. He cultivates a barren, hopelessly repetitive eroticism. (“She was a choice cut of meat and I hoped she held out for a fair price.”) Absorbed by the glamours and the corrosions of the flesh, he has not the strength to think through his confusion. Like everything else, it is a given fact of his condition. And Updike has no wish to think it through, either.

What excites Ben Turnbull is not, apparently, a subject fit for moral or psychological criticism. Updike is content to give us creatureliness without ethical dimension. His character refers now and again to transgression or trespass, but he is fundamentally a complacent man, forgiving himself everything, pitying his frailty and his fate, extracting a sensual enjoyment even from his occasional self-lacerations. He counsels the thugs on his property on the ways of the world, advising them to “mention casually” to prospective clients “that [they] would hate to see any of their children kidnapped,” and that “if they don't pay up [protection money]” the boys “might think about killing one of their cats.” Nor does he beat himself up about his relations with the 14-year-old girl of the gang, whom he visits when the others are away. There are traces of tenderness in their carefully delimited transactions. “She was cool to the touch, surprisingly, and clean-smelling,” Ben notes. “Her breasts smelled powdery, like a baby's skull, and her nipples were spherical, like paler, smokier versions of honeysuckle berries.” There is nothing in this of Nabokovian decadence or play. The man is merely not a bad guy, and he has no reason not to be tender to a young girl who allows him to place his tongue where he likes.

“She graciously offered to touch me, where I jutted,” he goes on, but he had earlier promised the boys “no penetration,” and the “hand-job” offered by the sweet young thing “would penetrate my soul.” This is as close as we come, in this novel, to “renunciation.” But the lapse into soul-fear is without conviction. Ben fears only exposure by his wife, the possible loss of “the island of repetitive safety [he] had carved from the world.” His little intoxications are pathetic things, as he well known about for him a full-fledged Dionysian rebellion, any more than a crisis of conscience. In the suburbs this homme moyen sensuel can savor the acid taste of teenage honeysuckle on his tongue while daydreaming through the sumptuously appointed living room, “a breezy, translucent person, a debonair proprietor.”

Toward the End of Time will call to mind earlier novels by Updike, especially Rabbit at Rest, with its self-destructive, relentlessly unappetizing protagonist Harry Angstrom. Like Ben Turnbull, Rabbit regards few things as “his problem” and accepts that he “never was that great” as father or husband. Both characters are unapologetic womanizers. In part an emblem of his society, Rabbit sees that in his America—as in the America of 2020—“everything [is] falling apart,” and though—like Ben Turnbull—he is at least mildly interested in many things, from science to history, he is resolutely unamenable to improvement or edification. Rabbit—like Ben—wins a modest claim on our sympathy principally by controlling premonitions of death, by acknowledging “something more ominous and intimately his: his own death. …” Ben is a more articulate person than Rabbit, less of a slob, but Updike grants him no greater portion of grace and discovers in his failings fewer occasions for satire of merriment.

Toward the End of Time is a simpler and less attractive book than Rabbit at Rest. For it is defiantly not a book about anything remediable, or about the way we live now. For all of its technical beauties, its proficiencies of diction and syntax, Updike's new novel is especially disheartening in its specious and half-hearted attempt to situate its private malaise in the aftermath of a terrible historical catastrophe. The book is not only indifferent to history, it exploits history. It uses the moral and historical grandeur of a world war to promote its cranky local obsessions to a level of universality and interest that they do not deserve. The near-destruction of the world notwithstanding, Toward the End of Time is just the familiar Updikean dystopia. The war in this book is an empty device, and spiritual exhaustion is written all over its pages.

There is in Ben Turnbull, as also in Updike's other characters here, no possibility of growth, and what passes for redemption is at most an activity of consciousness for which genuine advance is reducible to mechanical invention. The novel's easy acceptance of a long cosmic view—the “silently clamorous, imperiously silver and pure” rotation of the stars—merely flattens every prospect of judgment, penance, reconciliation, and change, and reduces it to triviality and illusion. In Updike, the words “transcendent” and “trust” and “virtue” have never before seemed so frivolous. The book seems a reflex of frustration and bitterness. To mistake one's own spiritual condition for the final measure of reality, to confuse one's own aggrieved, attenuated shadow on the wall with being itself in all its variety, is to offer a terribly impoverished version of experience. The wonder of it is that Updike, brilliant as ever in evoking the profusion of surface life, in making palpable what he once called “the skin of a living present,” seeks here only to distract us from the essential demoralization, the sense of nullity that holds even the novel's most vivid particulars firmly in its grip.