264
PARTISAN REVIEW
saint...Everything is connected in the end." But is it? When the word
"peace" appears finally on the computer screen, the novelist sees fit to
stop.
For all its existentialism and its radical form, DeLillo's big book exhibits
more strenuously than any other
in
the train of this review the novel's tra–
ditional ambition to link the individual and accidental to some larger system.
John Updike, our most prolific and exact observer of American mundanity,
conceives a revelatory future
in
Toward the End ojTime.
This, his eighteenth
novel, is a much smaller-in all senses-undertaking than DeLillo's and lacks
the energy of Updike's own better works. Yet it, too, engages, though half–
heartedly, to relate man to the culture of mankind. Its hero, discovered
in
the
imminent future of the year 2020, is still one of us, a survivor of our own
age. Everything has changed but perhaps is still the same.
An
extra, man–
made moon lights up the night sky along with the old one, and something
still more remarkable, a "torus," a miraculous presence in the form of a great
ring of light, visits from another world. On earth, the U.S. has lost a nuclear
war with China, our central government has collapsed, and social order is
maintained by rogue organizations of bandits turned police and eventually
operating within the appropriately named Fed Ex service. Yet the
Times
and
the
Globe
are delivered at the door and the shopping malls draw their
throngs, the work of the world goes on everywhere as well as in the State
Street investment firm from which Ben Turnbull has retired, the power
struggles of couples persist in and outside the bedroom in a way readers of
earlier Updike novels will recognize. Ben, at sixty-six (almost exactly the age
of his creator), is the representative of the aging of a society-ours-with no
hope of renewal. He has a comfy house on eleven acres of pretty land on the
North Shore and should have nothing to complain of except, as Hamlet says
of old men, that he has weak hams. He putters about the place, now and then
plays golf or goes on skiing weekends with aging buddies, sometimes is vis–
ited by grown children with whom he has no vital connection, and is locked
in a silent struggle to the death with his ever-loving wife.
This competent caretaker-of the house, of the grounds, of her
husband-is perhaps the most repellent female figure Updike has ever
depicted, and she reminds me a little of the wives in the misogynist
novels ofJohn
P.
Marquand. Ben and his Gloria are at odds in all ways,
but the only declared issue between them is a deer who has been nib–
bling the borders in her garden. She expects him to shoot it; he is less
than a man because he is reluctant to do so; the deer, a doe, wins his
heart wi th her soft brown gaze. From Gloria the look he receives-and
returns-is of a different kind: "Which of us will die first? We look
each other over every day, appraising the odds." His body constantly
reminds him that he is losing ground, and before the year he is record-
