Future Shock
John Updike is at bottom a
religious novelist, but when you try to identify what exactly his bottom-most
religious beliefs may be, the whole murky lot of them playfully slither
away--which gives his writing a touch of theological suspense. Typically, he
conjures a Lutheran or Presbyterian setting for his novels, and his enthusiasm
for those particular creeds induces him, at moments of crisis in one plot after
another, to plunk his guilty male culprit of a hero (Updike's heroes are almost
always guilty males) down on a hardwood pew and to subject him to a vigorous
Sunday sermon on biblical themes.
His new
novel, Toward the End of Time , takes place in a futuristic Massachusetts
in which nuclear war has leveled half of civilization, strange new metallic
animals are threatening to gobble mankind, government has collapsed, and a
gangsterish network of uniformed thugs called (chillingly) FedEx is
establishing a government network of its own. Yet even in this most bizarre of
Updike's novels, the guilty hero eventually finds himself sitting primly in a
pew, listening to a lady minister declaim on Mary Magdalene and her womanly
tears. What do these Sunday sermons amount to, though? Life is drab in Updike's
novels, and sins are vast, and the Christian pieties that come tumbling down
from the pulpit never seem adequate to the case. And so Updike, in his fervor,
goes on a search for God (to thus label the object of his desires) directly, by
means of an intimate, unblinking examination of the world in front of his own
nose.
He becomes a maniac of miniature observation. Atomic
particles dance in his eyesight. The world shimmers at him and, after a while,
encouraged by what he sees, he shimmers back, ecstatic. He is something very
close to a mystic in that respect--a transcendentalist in the old New England
literary tradition, agog at the indescribable radiance of the lawn at his feet,
or at the white brilliance of the refrigerator door, or at the ever-dazzling
dust motes floating through the sunbeams. He is Emerson--except that, like a
lunatic in an asylum, he has spent a lifetime in the mistaken belief that he is
Hawthorne.
Toward
the End of Time might seem different from his other novels because of the
sci-fi trappings, which do get rather fantastic. Updike's hero, Ben, a
66-year-old retired financial manager, is suddenly transposed across the ages
to ancient Egypt, then to the time of Jesus, then to medieval Ireland. He
begins an affair with a young call girl who on some other plane of existence
may be a deer, and then a new affair with a girl so young as still to be a
child. Strange astronomical weirdnesses roam across the post-nuclear sky. It's
all very puzzling, and the urgent hope that Updike will explain these many
mysteries keeps you faithfully turning the pages.
Arguably he does offer an explanation, by means
of a theory about how time can branch off in different directions and perform
different operations, like a computer program. Alternatively, you could regard
some of those strange doings as the addled fantasies of the aging suburban
hero, whose journal of a year, filled with rants against his wife and
pornographic musings and notations about his deteriorating health, constitutes
the novel. But either way, once you get past the sci-fi extravaganzas,
Toward the End of Time tells a story exactly like that in any number of
Updike's novels--of a man unhappy in marriage, blue with remorse, and unable to
figure out what to do, except by attending closely to the radiant surface of
the visible reality in front of him.
And so Updike's Ben observes
the passage of seasons--life bursting into blossom in early spring, for
instance:
There are suddenly
children wild on the streets, clogging the doorway to the convenience store,
raucously scraping their skateboards and roller blades along the sidewalks,
flaunting their pasty winter skins in shorts and baggy untucked T-shirts. Where
have they been all winter, these children? They are spontaneously, repulsively
hatched, like the flies that now buzz and bump on the inside of the kitchen
windows, drunk on warmth. Driving out to Route 128, I see a weeping cherry
tree, no less spectacular for being familiar, making its annual splash of
purple-pink ... and even along the driveway my poor little spindly pear trees
have devised a few blossoms, at one of which I saw a sleepy bee bumbling, my
first bee. On Route 128, for no practical reason, there is a thickening of
traffic--another spring phenomenon, garaged cars released.
In Toward the End of Time these descriptions never
quite rise to ecstatic levels, though. Ben remembers how, as a child, the pulp
magazines Amazing and Astounding , with their "remote, radiant,
exploding facts," used to relieve the pressure of everyday bleakness for him.
But facts seem to have lost that power. Ben's dutiful recording of miniscule
new shifts in foliage slips ever deeper into sadness. At the beginning of the
year he finds, or imagines, a tiny shred of second-rate love with his call
girl/deer, and later on finds, or imagines, an even tinier shred of a
preposterous less-than-love with his child-girlfriend. But by the end, he
cannot imagine being loved by any human being at all and comforts himself with
the pathetic idea that perhaps the fungus growing on the late-autumn soggy
ground is offering him, in some spongy vegetable manner of its own, the
acceptance he craves. "At times, curled beneath its soft beige gills of thallic
matter, a kind of breath hints of love." And it becomes poignantly clear that
Updike's hero is beginning to die, not just because his physical self is
deteriorating, but because he has a soul, which is shrinking.
It's not a great novel.
Updike scatters too many leafy sci-fi fantasies across his pages and never does
get around to raking them up again, which is disappointing. I don't entirely
believe those sci-fi notions, anyway. The cast of characters is a little thin.
But Updike, even in this book, is a great writer, the greatest we have, in his
particular areas of strength--in the control of visual details, in his rhythmic
intensity, in the colors and shapes that come pouring syncopatedly from his
mischievous pen. I fear that too many people will throw up their hands in
exasperation at Updike's way of appealing for love by presenting his heroes as
ever more odious or cantankerous, and too many other people will celebrate the
book mostly for its secondary virtues--its astronomical wonders sailing through
the futuristic sky, the human-chomping metal animals, a few political jokes.
But there is a primary virtue to this book, subtler than its other traits, and
this primary virtue is to be, ever so quietly, heartbreaking.
