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Set in the near future of 2020, this disconcerting philosophical fantasydepicts an America devastated by a war with China that has left its populace decimated, its government a shambles, and its natural resources tainted. The hero is Ben Turnbull, a sixty-six-year-old retired investment counselor, who, like Thoreau, sticks close to home and traces the course of one Massachusetts year in his journal. Something of a science buff, he finds that his disrupted personal history has been warped by the disjunctions and vagaries of the “many-worlds” hypothesis derived from the indeterminacy of quantum theory. His identity branches into variants extending back through the past and forward into the evolution of the universe, as both it and his own mortal, nature-haunted existence move toward the end of time.
Set in the near future of 2020, this disconcerting philosophical fantasydepicts an America devastated by a war with China that has left its populace decimated, its government a shambles, and its natural resources tainted. The hero is Ben Turnbull, a sixty-six-year-old retired investment counselor, who, like Thoreau, sticks close to home and traces the course of one Massachusetts year in his journal. Something of a science buff, he finds that his disrupted personal history has been warped by the disjunctions and vagaries of the “many-worlds” hypothesis derived from the indeterminacy of quantum theory. His identity branches into variants extending back through the past and forward into the evolution of the universe, as both it and his own mortal, nature-haunted existence move toward the end of time.
Due to publisher restrictions the library cannot purchase additional copies of this title, and we apologize if there is a long waiting list. Be sure to check for other copies, because there may be other editions available.
Due to publisher restrictions the library cannot purchase additional copies of this title, and we apologize if there is a long waiting list. Be sure to check for other copies, because there may be other editions available.
Excerpts-
From the book
i. The Deer
First snow: it came this year late in November. Gloria and I awoke to see a fragile white inch on the oak branches outside the bathroom windows, and on the curving driveway below, and on the circle of lawn the driveway encloses—the leaves still unraked, the grass still green. I looked into myself for a trace of childhood exhilaration at the sight and found none, just a quickened awareness of being behind in my chores and an unfocused dread of time itself, time that churns the seasons and that had brought me this new offering, this heavy new radiant day like a fresh meal brightly served in a hospital to a patient with a dwindling appetite.
And yet does the appetite for new days ever really cease? An hour later, I was exhilarated, clearing my porch and its single long granite step with my new orange plastic shovel, bought cheap and shaped like a scoop and much more silkily serviceable than the cumbersome metal snow shovels of my childhood, with their sticky surfaces and noisy bent edges. Plastic shovels are an improvement—can you believe it? The world does not only get worse. Lightweight, the shovel hurled flakes sparkling into the still air, onto the bobbing leucothoë in the border bed. There had been bloated yews there, planted by the previous owner beneath the windowsills and over the years grown to eclipse the windows and darken the living room. My wife, the dynamic Gloria, commanded men to come and tear them out and plant little bushes that in turn are getting increasingly shaggy. Nature refuses to rest.
The transient sparkles seemed for a microsecond engraved upon the air. The weathervane on the garage, a copper mallard in the act of landing—wings lifted, webbed feet spread—pointed west, into a wind too faint to be felt. The snow was too early and light to summon the plowing service (our garden-and-lawn service in its winter guise), and I hadn’t even planted the reflector stakes around the driveway; but that inch evidently intimidated the FedEx truck driver, for at some point in the quiet morning a stiff purple, orange, and white FedEx envelope appeared between the storm door and the front door without the truck’s making its way up the driveway. How did the envelope—containing some bond slips I was in no hurry for—get there? By the time I walked, in mid-afternoon, down to the mailbox, a number of trucks and cars, including one cautiously driven by my wife, had passed up and down. It was only when walking back up the hill that I was struck by—between the two broad grooves worn by tire treads—the footprints.
They were not mine. My boots have a distinctive sole, a mix of arcs and horizontals like the longitude and latitude lines on a globe. Nor could I match my stride to the other footprints—they were too far apart, though I am not short-legged, or unvigorous. But, stretch my legs as I would, I could not place my boots in the oblongs left by this other’s passing. Had a giant invaded my terrain? An angel dropped down from Heaven? The solution eventually came to me: the FedEx driver this morning, not wishing to trust his (or her; a number are women, in their policelike uniforms of gray-blue) wide truck to the upward twists of our driveway, had dismounted and raced up and back. He—no woman could have run uphill with such a stride—had cruelly felt the pressure of time.
Yet, though I had solved the mystery, the idea of a visitation by a supernatural being stayed with me, as I clumped into the house and spread the mail, the main spiritual meal of my day, upon the kitchen table. Perhaps the word is not “spiritual” but...
About the Author-
John Updike was born in Shillington, Pennsylvania, in 1932. He graduated from Harvard College in 1954 and spent a year in Oxford, England, at the Ruskin School of Drawing and Fine Art. From 1955 to 1957 he was a member of the staff of The New Yorker. His novels have won the Pulitzer Prize, the National Book Award, the National Book Critics Circle Award, the Rosenthal Foundation Award, and the William Dean Howells Medal. In 2007 he received the Gold Medal for Fiction from the American Academy of Arts and Letters. John Updike died in January 2009.
Reviews-
Starred review from September 1, 1997 One of the several new and exciting paths Updike takes in this magnificent new novel is its futuristic setting--the year 2020, after the Sino-American Conflict has destroyed the government, rendered the Great Plains a radioactive dustbowl and left the management of local affairs to thugs who demand protection money. Yet so subtly is this information introduced into the narrative that what remains paramount is not what has changed in this dangerous new world (although Updike imagines its particulars with brilliant specificity) but what has remained the same: the edgy relationship between the sexes, the wax and wane of the seasons, the pull of love and guilt between generations. Narrator Ben Turnbull begins his story on a snowy November day when a deer that is ravaging his property in coastal Massachusetts becomes the target of his ruthlessly efficient wife Gloria's zeal to eradicate what she cannot tame. In segues of time slippage, Ben imagines himself in other eras of history when brute force destroys civilization: among Egyptian grave robbers, as a monk of Lindisfarne slaughtered by Norse marauders, as a Nazi guard in a concentration camp. In more mundane moments, he enjoys sexual romps with the whore Deirdre, who may or may not be a metamorphosed deer, just as Gloria may or may not be dead. (She is not--and Deirdre decamps.) Meanwhile, some tough kids take up residence on the property and extort money, and a spectral torus glows in the sky. As the months pass--precisely observed by Ben in detailed, loving descriptions of the flora and fauna of each season--the tone of the book grows more ominous until, sure enough, a lawless incursion of cancer cells invades Ben's body. Updike's prose is --as ever--lush, lyrical and yet poetically precise. His control never wavers as Ben surveys the sorry state of the world in matter-of-fact terms, and the state of his libido, his relationships with Gloria, his children and his proliferating grandchildren in more agitated reflections. As Ben confronts the looming certainty that time is running out for him and for the universe, the narrative sweeps to a bittersweet conclusion befitting a book that has all the hallmarks of a classic. 75,000 first printing; BOMC main selection.
Chicago Tribune
"John Updike is a stylist of the highest order, capable of illuminating the sublime in the mundane, thereby elevating all of human experience."
Margaret Atwood, The New York Times Book Review
"As a writer, Updike can do anything he wants, and what he's wanted this time is quintessence of mortality. As memento mori and its obverse, carpe diem, Toward the End of Time could scarcely be bettered."
Robert Stone, The New York Review of Books
"Toward the End of Time has a force that gets under your skin."
The Miami Herald
"A book aimed not to resolve but to arouse a reader's wonder . . . Vintage Updike: marital angst worked out against the chilly backdrop of privilege, rendered with a lyricism and insight and eye for detail reminiscent of the work of Jane Austen."
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