MILLICENT BELL
265
ing is over he discovers that he has prostate cancer, and he submits to
an operation that robs him of sexual potency, once his chief joy.
Humiliatingly incontinent, he carries under his clothes a sloshing bag that
collects his own urine from his helpless bladder. And Gloria has an affair
with the professional she has hired to kill the deer.
Towards the End cifTime
is not, though, a straightforward realist novel,
however much it projects the endpoint of a certain variety of middle-class
American life. We are in the hands of a wily writer who, though a famous–
ly exact recorder of our times, a master of recognizable specificities, has also
written works of the free imagination like
The Centaur
(1963) and
The
Witches cif Eastwick
(1984). This time Updike has chosen to merge dreams
and actuality, leaving them queerly indistinguishable. Sliced intrusively into
the narrative and not obviously connected with it are what seem like
intended "parallel lives" out of past human history or even earlier transmi–
grations of Ben's present history-the experiences of some ancient
Egyptian grave robbers, of the author of Mark's Gospel, of a ninth-century
Irish monk killed by invading Norsemen, of a Nazi camp guard who bru–
talizes a Jew. From time to time his familiar New England scene is
replaced-it is not clear with what significance---by a landscape covered
with a vast fungus growth, and even in the woods that seem otherwise
unchanged he already comes upon a self-reproducing metallic life-form. At
an early point, Gloria simply disappears (gone on a trip, murdered by Ben?).
Without apology, the deer nibbling the euonymus "becomes a young lean–
bodied whore, whom I invite into the house."
Yet Ben's relationship with the metamorphosed Deirdre is at least as
visible on the page as his married life has been-more so, since it contains
more opportunities for Updike's well-known exact description, comic and
dispiriting at once, of the copulative process. There is nothing really left
for Ben to care about, it seems, besides having sex in a few well-tried ways,
and Deirdre is gratifyingly competent. She has quite ceased to be a super–
natural visitor; she is a young hooker who steals Gloria's sterling
centerpiece and Tabriz carpet and is as tough as sexist Turnbull when he
remarks, "One advantage of the collapse of civilization is that the quality
of young women who are becoming whores has gone way up. No more
raddled psychotics or puffY, dazed coke addicts for the discriminating con–
sumer. Twenty-year-olds who would once have become beauticians or
editorial assistants, nurses or paralegals, have brought efficiency and come–
liness to the trade."
Deirdre disappears from the story as suddenly and mysteriously as she
arrived and Gloria is back ("I had not shot her, or if I had it was in anoth–
er, slightly different universe"). But we continue to hear about Ben's
quondam mistress who appears to have found new friends. She is known to
