Consider the Lobster: And Other Essays

CERTAINLY THE END OF SOMETHING OR OTHER, ONE WOULD SORT OF HAVE TO THINK

MAILER, UPDIKE, ROTH — the Great Male Narcissists * who’ve dominated postwar American fiction are now in their senescence, and it must seem to them no coincidence that the prospect of their own deaths appears backlit by the approaching millennium and online predictions of the death of the novel as we know it. When a solipsist dies, after all, everything goes with him. And no US novelist has mapped the inner terrain of the solipsist better than John Updike, whose rise in the 1960s and ’70s established him as both chronicler and voice of probably the single most self-absorbed generation since Louis XIV. As were Freud’s, Updike’s big preoccupations have always been with death and sex (not necessarily in that order), and the fact that his books’ mood has gotten more wintry in recent years is understandable — Updike has always written mainly about himself, and since the surprisingly moving Rabbit at Rest he’s been exploring, more and more overtly, the apocalyptic prospect of his own death.

Toward the End of Time concerns an extremely erudite, successful, narcissistic, and sex-obsessed retired guy who’s keeping a one-year journal in which he explores the apocalyptic prospect of his own death. Toward the End of Time is also, of the let’s say two dozen Updike books I’ve read, far and away the worst, a novel so clunky and self-indulgent that it’s hard to believe the author let it be published in this kind of shape.

I’m afraid the preceding sentence is this review’s upshot, and most of the remainder here will consist simply of presenting evidence/justification for such a disrespectful assessment. First, though, if I may poke the critical head into the frame for just one moment, I’d like to offer assurances that your reviewer is not one of these spleen-venting spittle-spattering Updike haters one often encounters among literary readers under forty. The fact is that I am probably classifiable as one of the very few actual subforty Updike fans. Not as rabid a fan as, say, Nicholson Baker, but I do believe that The Poorhouse Fair, Of the Farm, and The Centaur are all great books, maybe classics. And even since ’81’s Rabbit Is Rich—as his characters seemed to become more and more repellent, and without any corresponding sign that the author understood that they were repellent — I’ve continued to read Updike’s novels and to admire the sheer gorgeousness of his descriptive prose.

Most of the literary readers I know personally are under forty, and a fair number are female, and none of them are big admirers of the postwar GMNs. But it’s John Updike in particular that a lot of them seem to hate. And not merely his books, for some reason — mention the poor man himself and you have to jump back:

“Just a penis with a thesaurus.”

“Has the son of a bitch ever had one unpublished thought?”

“Makes misogyny seem literary the same way Rush makes fascism seem funny.”

And trust me: these are actual quotations, and I’ve heard even worse ones, and they’re all usually accompanied by the sort of facial expression where you can tell there’s not going to be any profit in appealing to the intentional fallacy or talking about the sheer aesthetic pleasure of Updike’s prose. None of the other famous phallocrats of Updike’s generation — not Mailer, not Exley or Roth or even Bukowski — excites such violent dislike.

There are, of course, some obvious explanations for part of this dislike — jealousy, iconoclasm, PC backlash, and the fact that many of our parents revere Updike and it’s easy to revile what your parents revere. But I think the deep reason so many of my generation dislike Updike and the other GMNs has to do with these writers’ radical self-absorption, and with their uncritical celebration of this self-absorption both in themselves and in their characters.

John Updike, for example, has for decades been constructing protagonists who are basically all the same guy (see for instance Rabbit Angstrom, Dick Maple, Piet Hanema, Henry Bech, Rev. Tom Marshfield, Roger’s Version’s “Uncle Nunc”) and who are all clearly stand-ins for Updike himself. They always live in either Pennsylvania or New England, are either unhappily married or divorced, are roughly Updike’s age. Always either the narrator or the point-of-view character, they tend all to have the author’s astounding perceptual gifts; they think and speak in the same effortlessly lush, synesthetic way that Updike does. They are also always incorrigibly narcissistic, philandering, self-contemptuous, self-pitying … and deeply alone, alone the way only an emotional solipsist can be alone. They never seem to belong to any sort of larger unit or community or cause. Though usually family men, they never really love anybody — and, though always heterosexual to the point of satyriasis, they especially don’t love women. * The very world around them, as gorgeously as they see and describe it, tends to exist for them only insofar as it evokes impressions and associations and emotions and desires inside the great self.

I’m guessing that for the young educated adults of the sixties and seventies, for whom the ultimate horror was the hypocritical conformity and repression of their own parents’ generation, Updike’s evection of the libidinous self appeared refreshing and even heroic. But young adults of the nineties — many of whom are, of course, the children of all the impassioned infidelities and divorces Updike wrote about so beautifully, and who got to watch all this brave new individualism and sexual freedom deteriorate into the joyless and anomic self-indulgence of the Me Generation — today’s subforties have very different horrors, prominent among which are anomie and solipsism and a peculiarly American loneliness: the prospect of dying without even once having loved something more than yourself. Ben Turnbull, the narrator of Updike’s latest novel, is sixty-six years old and heading for just such a death, and he’s shitlessly scared. Like so many of Updike’s protagonists, though, Turnbull seems scared of all the wrong things.

Toward the End of Time is being marketed by its publisher as an ambitious departure for Updike, his foray into the futuristic-dystopic tradition of Huxley and Ballard and soft sci-fi. The year is AD 2020, and time has as they say not been kind. A Sino-American nuclear war has killed millions and ended centralized government as we know it. The dollar’s gone; Massachusetts now uses scrip named for Bill Weld. There are no more taxes; local toughs now charge fees to protect the well-to-do from other local toughs. AIDS has been cured, the Midwest is depopulated, and parts of Boston are bombed out and (presumably?) irradiated. An abandoned low-orbit space station hangs in the night sky like a junior moon. There are tiny but rapacious “metallobioforms” that have somehow mutated from toxic waste and go around eating electricity and the occasional human. Mexico has reappropriated the US Southwest and is threatening wholesale invasion even as thousands of young Americans are sneaking south across the Rio Grande in search of a better life. America, in short, is getting ready to die.

The novel’s futuristic elements are sometimes cool, and verily they would represent an ambitious departure for Updike if they weren’t all so sketchy and tangential, mostly tossed off as subordinate clauses in the narrator’s endless descriptions of every tree, plant, flower, and shrub around his home. What 95 percent of Toward the End of Time actually consists in is Ben Turnbull describing the prenominate flora (over and over again as each season passes) and his brittle, castrating wife Gloria, and remembering the ex-wife who divorced him for adultery, and rhapsodizing about a young prostitute he moves into the house when Gloria’s away on a trip. It’s also got a lot of pages of Turnbull brooding about senescence, mortality, and the tragedy of the human condition, and even more pages of Turnbull talking about sex and the imperiousness of the sexual urge, and detailing how he lusts after assorted prostitutes and secretaries and neighbors and bridge partners and daughters-in-law and a girl who’s part of the group of young toughs he pays for protection, a thirteen-year-old whose breasts—“shallow taut cones tipped with honeysuckle-berry nipples”—Turnbull finally gets to fondle in the woods behind his house when his wife’s not looking.

In case that summary sounds too harsh, here is some hard statistical evidence of just how much a “departure” from Updike’s regular MO this novel really is:

Total # of pages about Sino-American war — causes, duration, casualties: 0.75Total # of pages about deadly mutant metallobioforms: 1.5Total # of pages about flora around Turnbull’s New England home, plus fauna, weather, and how his ocean view looks in different seasons: 86 Total # of pages about Mexican repossession of US Southwest: 0.1Total # of pages about Ben Turnbull’s penis and his various thoughts and feelings about it: 10.5Total # of pages about what life’s like in Boston proper without municipal services or police, plus whether the war’s nuclear exchanges have caused fallout or radiation sickness: 0.0 Total # of pages about prostitute’s body, w/ particular attention to sexual loci: 8.5Total # of pages about golf: 15Total # of pages of Ben Turnbull saying things like “I want women to be dirty” and “She was a choice cut of meat and I hoped she held out for a fair price” and the quoted stuff at the bottom of p. 53 and “The sexual parts are fiends, sacrificing everything to that aching point of contact” and “ferocious female nagging is the price men pay for our much-lamented prerogatives, the power and the mobility and the penis”: 36.5

Toward the End of Time’s best parts are a half-dozen little set pieces where Turnbull imagines himself inhabiting different historical figures — a tomb robber in ancient Egypt, Saint Mark, a guard at a Nazi death camp, etc. They’re gems, and the reader wishes there were more of them. The problem is that they don’t have much of a function other than to remind us that Updike can write really great little imaginative set pieces when he’s in the mood. Their plot justification stems from the fact that the narrator is a science fan (the novel has minilectures on astrophysics and quantum mechanics, nicely written but evincing a roughly Newsweek-level comprehension). Turnbull is particularly keen on subatomic physics and something he calls the “Theory of Many Worlds”—a real theory, by the way, which was proposed in the fifties as a solution to certain quantum paradoxes entailed by the Principles of Indeterminacy and Complementarity, and which in truth is wildly complex and technical, but which Turnbull seems to believe is basically the same as the Theory of Past-Life Channeling, thereby explaining the set pieces where Turnbull is somebody else. The whole quantum setup ends up being embarrassing in the special way something pretentious is embarrassing when it’s also wrong.

Better, and more convincingly futuristic, are the narrator’s soliloquies on the blue-to-red shift and the eventual implosion of the known universe near the book’s end; and these would be among the novel’s highlights, too, if it weren’t for the fact that Ben Turnbull is interested in cosmic apocalypse all and only because it serves as a grand metaphor for his own personal death. Likewise all the Housmanesque descriptions of the Beautiful But Achingly Transient flowers in his yard, and the optometrically significant year 2020, and the book’s final, heavy description of “small pale moths [that] have mistakenly hatched” on a late-autumn day and “flip and flutter a foot or two above the asphalt as if trapped in a narrow wedge of space-time beneath the obliterating imminence of winter.”

The clunky bathos of this novel seems to have infected even the line-by-line prose, Updike’s great strength for almost forty years. Toward the End of Time does have flashes of beautiful writing — deer described as “tender-faced ruminants,” leaves as “chewed to lace by Japanese beetles,” a car’s tight turn as a “slur” and its departure as a “dismissive acceleration down the driveway.” But a horrific percentage of the book consists of stuff like “Why indeed do women weep? They weep, it seemed to my wandering mind, for the world itself, in its beauty and waste, its mingled cruelty and tenderness” and “How much of summer is over before it begins! Its beginning marks its end, as our birth entails our death” and “This development seems remote, however, among the many more urgent issues of survival on our blasted, depopulated planet.” Not to mention whole reams of sentences with so many modifiers—“The insouciance and innocence of our independence twinkled like a kind of sweat from their bare and freckled or honey-colored or mahogany limbs”—and so much subordination—“As our species, having given itself a hard hit, staggers, the others, all but counted out, move in”—and such heavy alliteration—“the broad sea blares a blue I would not have believed obtainable without a tinted filter”—that they seem less like John Updike than like somebody doing a mean parody of John Updike.

Besides distracting us with worries about whether Updike might be injured or ill, the turgidity of the prose here also ups our dislike of the novel’s narrator. (It’s hard to like somebody whose way of saying that his wife doesn’t like going to bed before him is “She hated it when I crept into bed and disturbed in her the fragile chain of steps whereby consciousness dissolves” or who refers to his grandchildren as “this evidence that my pending oblivion had been hedged, my seed had taken root.”) And this dislike pretty much torpedoes Toward the End of Time, a novel whose tragic climax is a prostate operation that leaves Turnbull impotent and extremely bummed. It is made clear that the author expects us to sympathize with or even share Turnbull’s grief at “the pathetic shrunken wreck the procedures [have] made of my beloved genitals.” These demands on our compassion echo the major crisis of the book’s first half, described in a flashback, where we are supposed to empathize not only with the rather textbookish existential dread that hits Turnbull at thirty as he’s in his basement building a dollhouse for his daughter—“I would die, but also the little girl I was making this for would die…. There was no God, each detail of the rusting, moldering cellar made clear, just Nature, which would consume my life as carelessly and relentlessly as it would a dung-beetle corpse in a compost pile”—but also with Turnbull’s relief at discovering a remedy for this dread—“an affair, my first. Its colorful weave of carnal revelation and intoxicating risk and craven guilt eclipsed the devouring gray sensation of time.”

Maybe the one thing that the reader ends up appreciating about Ben Turnbull is that he’s such a broad caricature of an Updike protagonist that he helps clarify what’s been so unpleasant and frustrating about this author’s recent characters. It’s not that Turnbull is stupid: he can quote Pascal and Kierkegaard on angst, discourse on the death of Schubert, distinguish between a sinistrorse and a dextrorse Polygonum vine, etc. It’s that he persists in the bizarre, adolescent belief that getting to have sex with whomever one wants whenever one wants to is a cure for human despair. And Toward the End of Time’s author, so far as I can figure out, believes it too. Updike makes it plain that he views the narrator’s final impotence as catastrophic, as the ultimate symbol of death itself, and he clearly wants us to mourn it as much as Turnbull does. I am not shocked or offended by this attitude; I mostly just don’t get it. Rampant or flaccid, Ben Turnbull’s unhappiness is obvious right from the novel’s first page. It never once occurs to him, though, that the reason he’s so unhappy is that he’s an asshole.

1998