Saturday, December 23, 2006
An Updike Glitter
It’s good to see an author of John Updike’s stature reviving one of V.I. Lenin’s favourite nouns, as in this complaint about the modernisation of Boston’s North Station:
A sickening smell of hot cheese wafts everywhere from a pizzeria that has been installed at the end where the cretins who attend sporting events in Fleet Center might be tempted to coat their guts with fat and gluten.
Worse, this is an age in which young women blow bubble gum:
In this place, for decades a daily station of my pilgrimage, the young woman unthinkingly showed me her pink bubble, and then wolfed it back, seething with bacteria, into her oral cavity.
There’s a lot about corporeality and disgust in Toward the End of Time (1997), which combines a vision of the U.S.A. in decline with the physical disintegration of its male narrator. I think it’s one of Updike’s more interesting novels. The materials of the book are familiar Updike territory – the world of white professional affluence, big house, eleven acres, an attractive wife, an unfaithful husband – but it’s a world which is falling apart from every angle.
The novel is set in 2020, after a war with China. Swathes of the USA have been wiped out. Mexico has put up barriers to Americans trying to flee south. This vision of the U.S.A. fraying at the edges is mixed in with the elderly narrator’s sense that things aren’t what they used to be. Modern life has become graceless and coarse. There’s a hard satirical edge to all this and the book is often very funny in conveying its main character’s loathing of modern life.
In many ways it’s a very traditional Updike novel – in others it implodes those familiarities. The narrative goes off in different directions. The wife vanishes. A whore takes her place. The whore goes away. Without explanation, the wife returns. What’s going on?
Updike invites us to read his book in different ways. We discover that the first-person narrator is, in fact, Ben Turnbull, the character whose consciousness we are inside. He isn’t thinking these events but writing them. The novel is a journal – but a remarkably fluent one, less like an ordinary journal or diary than, well, a novel by John Updike. So why (as Stephen Mitchelmore would ask) is he writing it? An explanation is offered at the moment when Turnbull observes the care with which his wife attends to her teeth and her fingernails (not incidental details – her teeth and fangs grow sharper as Turnbull physically dwindles):
All these rites, I see, are her way of trying to freeze and defeat time, as mine is the writing of these scattered sad paragraphs. Futile, both exercises, but only in the long run.
But if Turnbull is the recorder of the novel’s events, perhaps they do not all happen. There is a metaphysics driving the narrative on – the theory of parallel universes. Our lives arrive at defining moments and split in different directions. In one life we do this, in another we do that. Our parallel selves inhabit different worlds, simultaneously in time. This is Turnbull’s condition. In one world a whore moves in to replace his wife, and the teenagers who invade his estate are murdered. In the other world his wife never leaves and there are no teenagers.
Perhaps Turnbull is not, after all, plunging in and out of time, in and out of different realities. Perhaps these are just the consoling fantasies of an ageing, libidinous male - a not particularly attractive individual - whose body is beginning to fail him. Or perhaps we really are in 2020 and there really has been a war with China. Or perhaps this is just the bitter, satirical, exaggerated vision of an elderly, dying man sickened by the vulgarity of modern American life.
As a satire, Toward the End of Time is frequently very funny and very entertaining. As an account of the drifting apart of a selfish, hard-nosed couple complacently immersed in their affluence and their self-satisfactions the novel is engaging and very readable. And, as so often with Updike, the book is a rich plum pudding of figurative language. There are frequent moments of dazzling brilliance – descriptions such as ‘the fuzzy Rothko that insomnia painted on the ceiling’. But there is too much of it. The book is surfeited with style, glutted with self-consciously fine writing. And it seems to me that this goes against the grain of the novel. This is a book about the last year in the life of a man. Just beyond the last sentence of the last page is the fact of his death.
But Ben Turnbull never really confronts that void. The book processes his perceptions and insights but he never really achieves any kind of genuine self-knowledge. Updike, a prodigiously well-read author, uses Turnbull to unload quantities of fact and information upon the reader. The novel is like reading a superior kind of magazine, full of data designed to make you respond: How interesting - I never knew that. Often it is scientific knowledge that is dumped on the reader – astronomical, biological, geographical, anthropological. It’s a novel studded with exquisite imagery, interesting knowledge, beautifully processed accounts of American society and geography and relationships. That rich surfeit becomes a wall, shutting out the consciousness of death. Death’s imminence becomes the occasion for another fancy outbreak of style:
The weather is so warm a multitude of small pale moths have mistakenly hatched. In the early dark they 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.
It is, as every good student of literature at once perceives, symbolic.
And so, with those two sentences, Toward the End of Time finishes. The hero physically disintegrates in the course of the novel, losing that aspect of his physicality which most matters to him, his sexual potency. But though the narrative wavers in the direction of other possibilities, other worlds, in the end it pulls itself together and terminates with the familiar comforts of a rounded conclusion, the underwriting of the lives of solid and interesting characters, the self-conscious shine of a finely written conclusion. The deer which annoys the wife by eating plants in her garden is killed, its corpse graphically attended to, but human death is not addressed – more drowned out by noise, by wordiness, blanked and evaded by an omnipresent glitter.
A sickening smell of hot cheese wafts everywhere from a pizzeria that has been installed at the end where the cretins who attend sporting events in Fleet Center might be tempted to coat their guts with fat and gluten.
Worse, this is an age in which young women blow bubble gum:
In this place, for decades a daily station of my pilgrimage, the young woman unthinkingly showed me her pink bubble, and then wolfed it back, seething with bacteria, into her oral cavity.
There’s a lot about corporeality and disgust in Toward the End of Time (1997), which combines a vision of the U.S.A. in decline with the physical disintegration of its male narrator. I think it’s one of Updike’s more interesting novels. The materials of the book are familiar Updike territory – the world of white professional affluence, big house, eleven acres, an attractive wife, an unfaithful husband – but it’s a world which is falling apart from every angle.
The novel is set in 2020, after a war with China. Swathes of the USA have been wiped out. Mexico has put up barriers to Americans trying to flee south. This vision of the U.S.A. fraying at the edges is mixed in with the elderly narrator’s sense that things aren’t what they used to be. Modern life has become graceless and coarse. There’s a hard satirical edge to all this and the book is often very funny in conveying its main character’s loathing of modern life.
In many ways it’s a very traditional Updike novel – in others it implodes those familiarities. The narrative goes off in different directions. The wife vanishes. A whore takes her place. The whore goes away. Without explanation, the wife returns. What’s going on?
Updike invites us to read his book in different ways. We discover that the first-person narrator is, in fact, Ben Turnbull, the character whose consciousness we are inside. He isn’t thinking these events but writing them. The novel is a journal – but a remarkably fluent one, less like an ordinary journal or diary than, well, a novel by John Updike. So why (as Stephen Mitchelmore would ask) is he writing it? An explanation is offered at the moment when Turnbull observes the care with which his wife attends to her teeth and her fingernails (not incidental details – her teeth and fangs grow sharper as Turnbull physically dwindles):
All these rites, I see, are her way of trying to freeze and defeat time, as mine is the writing of these scattered sad paragraphs. Futile, both exercises, but only in the long run.
But if Turnbull is the recorder of the novel’s events, perhaps they do not all happen. There is a metaphysics driving the narrative on – the theory of parallel universes. Our lives arrive at defining moments and split in different directions. In one life we do this, in another we do that. Our parallel selves inhabit different worlds, simultaneously in time. This is Turnbull’s condition. In one world a whore moves in to replace his wife, and the teenagers who invade his estate are murdered. In the other world his wife never leaves and there are no teenagers.
Perhaps Turnbull is not, after all, plunging in and out of time, in and out of different realities. Perhaps these are just the consoling fantasies of an ageing, libidinous male - a not particularly attractive individual - whose body is beginning to fail him. Or perhaps we really are in 2020 and there really has been a war with China. Or perhaps this is just the bitter, satirical, exaggerated vision of an elderly, dying man sickened by the vulgarity of modern American life.
As a satire, Toward the End of Time is frequently very funny and very entertaining. As an account of the drifting apart of a selfish, hard-nosed couple complacently immersed in their affluence and their self-satisfactions the novel is engaging and very readable. And, as so often with Updike, the book is a rich plum pudding of figurative language. There are frequent moments of dazzling brilliance – descriptions such as ‘the fuzzy Rothko that insomnia painted on the ceiling’. But there is too much of it. The book is surfeited with style, glutted with self-consciously fine writing. And it seems to me that this goes against the grain of the novel. This is a book about the last year in the life of a man. Just beyond the last sentence of the last page is the fact of his death.
But Ben Turnbull never really confronts that void. The book processes his perceptions and insights but he never really achieves any kind of genuine self-knowledge. Updike, a prodigiously well-read author, uses Turnbull to unload quantities of fact and information upon the reader. The novel is like reading a superior kind of magazine, full of data designed to make you respond: How interesting - I never knew that. Often it is scientific knowledge that is dumped on the reader – astronomical, biological, geographical, anthropological. It’s a novel studded with exquisite imagery, interesting knowledge, beautifully processed accounts of American society and geography and relationships. That rich surfeit becomes a wall, shutting out the consciousness of death. Death’s imminence becomes the occasion for another fancy outbreak of style:
The weather is so warm a multitude of small pale moths have mistakenly hatched. In the early dark they 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.
It is, as every good student of literature at once perceives, symbolic.
And so, with those two sentences, Toward the End of Time finishes. The hero physically disintegrates in the course of the novel, losing that aspect of his physicality which most matters to him, his sexual potency. But though the narrative wavers in the direction of other possibilities, other worlds, in the end it pulls itself together and terminates with the familiar comforts of a rounded conclusion, the underwriting of the lives of solid and interesting characters, the self-conscious shine of a finely written conclusion. The deer which annoys the wife by eating plants in her garden is killed, its corpse graphically attended to, but human death is not addressed – more drowned out by noise, by wordiness, blanked and evaded by an omnipresent glitter.
# posted by Ellis : 6:42 AM
