Consider the Lobster (7 page)

I’m guessing that for the young educated adults of the sixties and seventies, for whom the ultimate horror was the hypocritical conformity and repression of their own parents’ generation, Updike’s evection of the libidinous self appeared refreshing and even heroic. But young adults of the nineties—many of whom are, of course, the children of all the impassioned infidelities and divorces Updike wrote about so beautifully, and who got to watch all this brave new individualism and sexual freedom deteriorate into the joyless and anomic self-indulgence of the Me Generation—today’s subforties have very different horrors, prominent among which are anomie and solipsism and a peculiarly American loneliness: the prospect of dying without even once having loved something more than yourself. Ben Turnbull, the narrator of Updike’s latest novel, is sixty-six years old and heading for just such a death, and he’s shitlessly scared. Like so many of Updike’s protagonists, though, Turnbull seems scared of all the wrong things.

Toward the End of Time
is being marketed by its publisher as an ambitious departure for Updike, his foray into the futuristic-dystopic tradition of Huxley and Ballard and soft sci-fi. The year is AD 2020, and time has as they say not been kind. A Sino-American nuclear war has killed millions and ended centralized government as we know it. The dollar’s gone; Massachusetts now uses scrip named for Bill Weld. There are no more taxes; local toughs now charge fees to protect the well-to-do from other local toughs. AIDS has been cured, the Midwest is depopulated, and parts of Boston are bombed out and (presumably?) irradiated. An abandoned low-orbit space station hangs in the night sky like a junior moon. There are tiny but rapacious “metallobioforms” that have somehow mutated from toxic waste and go around eating electricity and the occasional human. Mexico has reappropriated the US Southwest and is threatening wholesale invasion even as thousands of young Americans are sneaking south across the Rio Grande in search of a better life. America, in short, is getting ready to die.

The novel’s futuristic elements are sometimes cool, and verily they would represent an ambitious departure for Updike if they weren’t all so sketchy and tangential, mostly tossed off as subordinate clauses in the narrator’s endless descriptions of every tree, plant, flower, and shrub around his home. What 95 percent of
Toward the End of Time
actually consists in is Ben Turnbull describing the prenominate flora (over and over again as each season passes) and his brittle, castrating wife Gloria, and remembering the ex-wife who divorced him for adultery, and rhapsodizing about a young prostitute he moves into the house when Gloria’s away on a trip. It’s also got a lot of pages of Turnbull brooding about senescence, mortality, and the tragedy of the human condition, and even more pages of Turnbull talking about sex and the imperiousness of the sexual urge, and detailing how he lusts after assorted prostitutes and secretaries and neighbors and bridge partners and daughters-in-law and a girl who’s part of the group of young toughs he pays for protection, a thirteen-year-old whose breasts—“shallow taut cones tipped with honeysuckle-berry nipples”—Turnbull finally gets to fondle in the woods behind his house when his wife’s not looking.

In case that summary sounds too harsh, here is some hard statistical evidence of just how much a “departure” from Updike’s regular MO this novel really is:

Total # of pages about Sino-American war—causes, duration, casualties: 0.75

Total # of pages about deadly mutant metallobioforms: 1.5

Total # of pages about flora around Turnbull’s New England home, plus fauna, weather, and how his ocean view looks in different seasons: 86

Total # of pages about Mexican repossession of US Southwest: 0.1

Total # of pages about Ben Turnbull’s penis and his various thoughts and feelings about it: 10.5

Total # of pages about what life’s like in Boston proper without municipal services or police, plus whether the war’s nuclear exchanges have caused fallout or radiation sickness: 0.0

Total # of pages about prostitute’s body, w/ particular attention to sexual loci: 8.5

Total # of pages about golf: 15

Total # of pages of Ben Turnbull saying things like “I want women to be dirty” and “She was a choice cut of meat and I hoped she held out for a fair price” and the quoted stuff at the bottom of p. 53 and “The sexual parts are fiends, sacrificing everything to that aching point of contact” and “ferocious female nagging is the price men pay for our much-lamented prerogatives, the power and the mobility and the penis”: 36.5

Toward the End of Time’
s best parts are a half-dozen little set pieces where Turnbull imagines himself inhabiting different historical figures—a tomb robber in ancient Egypt, Saint Mark, a guard at a Nazi death camp, etc. They’re gems, and the reader wishes there were more of them. The problem is that they don’t have much of a function other than to remind us that Updike can write really great little imaginative set pieces when he’s in the mood. Their plot justification stems from the fact that the narrator is a science fan (the novel has minilectures on astrophysics and quantum mechanics, nicely written but evincing a roughly
Newsweek
-level comprehension). Turnbull is particularly keen on subatomic physics and something he calls the “Theory of Many Worlds”—a real theory, by the way, which was proposed in the fifties as a solution to certain quantum paradoxes entailed by the Principles of Indeterminacy and Complementarity, and which in truth is wildly complex and technical, but which Turnbull seems to believe is basically the same as the Theory of Past-Life Channeling, thereby explaining the set pieces where Turnbull is somebody else. The whole quantum setup ends up being embarrassing in the special way something pretentious is embarrassing when it’s also wrong.

Better, and more convincingly futuristic, are the narrator’s soliloquies on the blue-to-red shift and the eventual implosion of the known universe near the book’s end; and these would be among the novel’s highlights, too, if it weren’t for the fact that Ben Turnbull is interested in cosmic apocalypse all and only because it serves as a grand metaphor for his own personal death. Likewise all the Housmanesque descriptions of the Beautiful But Achingly Transient flowers in his yard, and the optometrically significant year 2020, and the book’s final, heavy description of “small pale moths [that] have mistakenly hatched” on a late-autumn day and “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.”

The clunky bathos of this novel seems to have infected even the line-by-line prose, Updike’s great strength for almost forty years.
Toward the End of Time
does have flashes of beautiful writing—deer described as “tender-faced ruminants,” leaves as “chewed to lace by Japanese beetles,” a car’s tight turn as a “slur” and its departure as a “dismissive acceleration down the driveway.” But a horrific percentage of the book consists of stuff like “Why indeed do women weep? They weep, it seemed to my wandering mind, for the world itself, in its beauty and waste, its mingled cruelty and tenderness” and “How much of summer is over before it begins! Its beginning marks its end, as our birth entails our death” and “This development seems remote, however, among the many more urgent issues of survival on our blasted, depopulated planet.” Not to mention whole reams of sentences with so many modifiers—“The insouciance and innocence of our independence twinkled like a kind of sweat from their bare and freckled or honey-colored or mahogany limbs”—and so much subordination—“As our species, having given itself a hard hit, staggers, the others, all but counted out, move in”—and such heavy alliteration—“the broad sea blares a blue I would not have believed obtainable without a tinted filter”—that they seem less like John Updike than like somebody doing a mean parody of John Updike.

Besides distracting us with worries about whether Updike might be injured or ill, the turgidity of the prose here also ups our dislike of the novel’s narrator. (It’s hard to like somebody whose way of saying that his wife doesn’t like going to bed before him is “She hated it when I crept into bed and disturbed in her the fragile chain of steps whereby consciousness dissolves” or who refers to his grandchildren as “this evidence that my pending oblivion had been hedged, my seed had taken root.”) And this dislike pretty much torpedoes
Toward the End of Time,
a novel whose tragic climax is a prostate operation that leaves Turnbull impotent and extremely bummed. It is made clear that the author expects us to sympathize with or even share Turnbull’s grief at “the pathetic shrunken wreck the procedures [have] made of my beloved genitals.” These demands on our compassion echo the major crisis of the book’s first half, described in a flashback, where we are supposed to empathize not only with the rather textbookish existential dread that hits Turnbull at thirty as he’s in his basement building a dollhouse for his daughter—“I would die, but also the little girl I was making this for would die… . There was no God, each detail of the rusting, moldering cellar made clear, just Nature, which would consume my life as carelessly and relentlessly as it would a dung-beetle corpse in a compost pile”—but also with Turnbull’s relief at discovering a remedy for this dread—“an affair, my first. Its colorful weave of carnal revelation and intoxicating risk and craven guilt eclipsed the devouring gray sensation of time.”

Maybe the one thing that the reader ends up appreciating about Ben Turnbull is that he’s such a broad caricature of an Updike protagonist that he helps clarify what’s been so unpleasant and frustrating about this author’s recent characters. It’s not that Turnbull is stupid: he can quote Pascal and Kierkegaard on angst, discourse on the death of Schubert, distinguish between a sinistrorse and a dextrorse
Polygonum
vine, etc. It’s that he persists in the bizarre, adolescent belief that getting to have sex with whomever one wants whenever one wants to is a cure for human despair. And
Toward the End of Time’
s author, so far as I can figure out, believes it too. Updike makes it plain that he views the narrator’s final impotence as catastrophic, as the ultimate symbol of death itself, and he clearly wants us to mourn it as much as Turnbull does. I am not shocked or offended by this attitude; I mostly just don’t get it. Rampant or flaccid, Ben Turnbull’s unhappiness is obvious right from the novel’s first page. It never once occurs to him, though, that the reason he’s so unhappy is that he’s an asshole.

1998

ONE REASON
for my willingness to speak publicly on a subject for which I am direly underqualified is that it affords me a chance to declaim for you a short story of Kafka’s that I have given up teaching in literature classes and miss getting to read aloud. Its English title is “A Little Fable”:

“Alas,” said the mouse, “the world is growing smaller every day. At the beginning it was so big that I was afraid, I kept running and running, and I was glad when at last I saw walls far away to the right and left, but these long walls have narrowed so quickly that I am in the last chamber already, and there in the corner stands the trap that I must run into.” “You only need to change your direction,” said the cat, and ate it up.

For me, a signal frustration in trying to read Kafka with college students is that it is next to impossible to get them to see that Kafka is funny. Nor to appreciate the way funniness is bound up with the power of his stories. Because, of course, great short stories and great jokes have a lot in common. Both depend on what communications theorists sometimes call
exformation,
which is a certain quantity of vital information removed from but evoked by a communication in such a way as to cause a kind of explosion of associative connections within the recipient.
¹
This is probably why the effect of both short stories and jokes often feels sudden and percussive, like the venting of a long-stuck valve. It’s not for nothing that Kafka spoke of literature as “a hatchet with which we chop at the frozen seas inside us.” Nor is it an accident that the technical achievement of great short stories is often called
compression
—for both the pressure and the release are already inside the reader. What Kafka seems able to do better than just about anyone else is to orchestrate the pressure’s increase in such a way that it becomes intolerable at the precise instant it is released.

The psychology of jokes helps account for part of the problem in teaching Kafka. We all know that there is no quicker way to empty a joke of its peculiar magic than to try to explain it—to point out, for example, that Lou Costello is mistaking the proper name
Who
for the interrogative pronoun
who,
and so on. And we all know the weird antipathy such explanations arouse in us, a feeling of not so much boredom as offense, as if something has been blasphemed. This is a lot like the teacher’s feelings at running a Kafka story through the gears of your standard undergrad critical analysis—plot to chart, symbols to decode, themes to exfoliate, etc. Kafka, of course, would be in a unique position to appreciate the irony of submitting his short stories to this kind of high-efficiency critical machine, the literary equivalent of tearing the petals off and grinding them up and running the goo through a spectrometer to explain why a rose smells so pretty. Franz Kafka, after all, is the story writer whose “Poseidon” imagines a sea god so overwhelmed with administrative paperwork that he never gets to sail or swim, and whose “In the Penal Colony” conceives description as punishment and torture as edification and the ultimate critic as a needled harrow whose coup de grâce is a spike through the forehead.