Toward the End of Time (PMC)
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品牌: John Updike
基本信息·出版社：Penguin Classics
·页码：352 页
·出版日期：2006年
·ISBN：0141188960
·条形码：9780141188966
·装帧：平装
·正文语种：英语
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内容简介Ben Turnbull is a 66 year-old retired investment consultant living north of Boston in the year 2020. A recent war between the United States and China has thinned the population and brought social chaos. Nevertheless, Ben's life, traced by his journal entries over the course of the year, retains much of its accustomed comforts. Something of a science buff, he finds his personal history cuaght up in the dysjunctions and vagaries of the 'many universes'; his identity branches into variants extending back through history and ahead in the evolution of the universe, as both it and his own mortal, nature-shrouded existence move toward the end of time ...
作者简介John Updike was born in 1932. He graduated from Harvard in 1954 and spent a year in England, at the Ruskin School of Drawing and Fine Art at Oxford from 1955 to 1957. He has written over 40 books. He lives in Massachusetts, USA.
编辑推荐From Library Journal
Updike again, understandably autumnal in his 18th novel and 48th book. It's 2020, and war with China has left the United States in a shambles. As cheerfully retired investment counselor Ben Turnbull gets caught up in the "many-universes" theory resulting from the indeterminacy of quantum mechanics, he finds his identity racing back and forth in time.
Copyright 1997 Reed Business Information, Inc.--This text refers to theHardcoveredition.
FromBooklist
This is Updike's millennium novel. Who better than he--vastly intelligent observer of morals and mores over the past half-century--to wrap up fin de siecle life in one, big, magnificent novel that both concludes and foresees? But what a disappointment! It's set in the future--2020, to be exact. What is the point of setting the story ahead in time while at thesame timegiving next to no feel that things are different? A war is supposed to have happened between the U.S. and China, but it seems to have had as little effect on daily life as some small skirmish in Somalia. Ben Turnbull narrates a year in his life; he's in his late sixties, a semiretired investor, a lover of science. He and his wife have arguments over a deer who is nibbling her lawn and garden away; Ben has thoughts about science, which he yammers on and on about to the absolute distraction of the follower of this curious narrative. Ben thinks he has shot his wife instead of the deer, and the deer turns into a young woman, with whom he has an affair, but, clank, reality sets in again, and his wife is back. Huh? Even Updike's gorgeous style cannot jump-start this plot; it's gone lame at the starting gate. Still, his legion of fans will want to decide for themselves.
Brad Hooper--This text refers to theHardcoveredition.
From Kirkus Reviews
Updike's adventurous 18th novel--a dystopian romance, set in the year 2020--contrasts intriguingly with last year's generational saga In the Beauty of the Lilies. In a privileged north-of-Boston neighborhood that recalls the hotbeds, so to speak, of such earlier novels as Couples and The Witches of Eastwick, narrator Ben Turnbull, a 66-year-old former investment counselor, lives in placid retirement with his younger second wife Gloria and spends his waning energies in occasional quasi-business trips to his old Boston office, golf with his male buddies, visits to and from his five children and ten grandchildren, and (over)heated dalliances with Deirdre, his favorite young whore, who makes house calls whenever Gloria's away. ``The universe is collapsing,'' Ben opines--and indeed, in his insular postlapsarian little world, citizens pay protection money to competing mobsters (and, later, to Federal Express) in lieu of taxes, and Massachusetts ``scrip'' has replaced the once almighty dollar following a nuclear war the US lost to China. It's a clever premise, and an effective background for the somewhat attenuated story of Ben's adjustment to the changes in his world and in himself. And the novel contains some of Updike's funniest writing in years (Ben's precariously maintained d‚tente with his energetic scold of a wife is most amusingly described), and his fluid, flexible prose and descriptive precision remain unimpaired. But the story wanders. Ben's many ruminations (science is his avocation), though wonderfully done, are nevertheless digressions that interrupt such far more interesting matters as the fate of a marauding doe that grazes among Gloria's flowers and shrubs, and Ben's avuncular relationship with three teenage ``squatters'' who appropriate his property and blithely shake him down. And the emphasis on Ben's relentless sex drive--metaphor for the life force or not--becomes, simply, tiresome. Never less than readable, but not nearly the book it might have been. Minor Updike. (First printing of 75,000; Book-of-the- Month Club main selection) --Copyright ©1997, Kirkus Associates, LP. All rights reserved.--This text refers to theHardcoveredition.
Review
Mr. Updike's latest novel opens with a first snowfall and a disagreement between the narrator, a retired financial adviser, and his still very active wife. Ben Turnbull wants to relax and enjoy the natural world. She wants the property to resemble a parquet floor. These people are living, however, in the year 2020. There has been a disastrous Sino-American nuclear war. The remnants of the federal government are holed up somewhere, sending out tax bills that nobody pays. Massachusetts does local business with a scrip called welders. The novel purports to be Ben's journal. There are elements of magic realism in the text, and a few borrowings from science fiction, but futuristic fantasy is the book's basic character. It combines melancholy reflections on the passage of time with the author's mischievously idiosyncratic notions of what will survive Ragnarok. The list includes nagging wives, National Geographic, the North Shore commuter line, opportunistic crime, the pursuit of young girls by old boys, UPS, and the telephone, on which mechanical voices continue to order the pushing of buttons that lead ad infinitum to other mechanical voices. Ben considers history and golf games. He meditates on black holes and his health. He records weather and seasons with precision and lyrical appreciation. He observes that "if not magical, men are not much," and describes a corpse as "this slumped puddle of deactivated molecules." He becomes, without warning or explanation, a man of other times and places. Altogether, he is a fascinating, amusing, eloquent companion, and one feels genuine regret when the year, his journal, and with them Mr. Updike's novel come to an end. --The Atlantic Monthly, Phoebe-Lou Adams
Mr. Updike's latest novel opens with a first snowfall and a disagreement between the narrator, a retired financial adviser, and his still very active wife. Ben Turnbull wants to relax and enjoy the natural world. She wants the property to resemble a parquet floor. These people are living, however, in the year 2020. There has been a disastrous Sino-American nuclear war. The remnants of the federal government are holed up somewhere, sending out tax bills that nobody pays. Massachusetts does local business with a scrip called welders. The novel purports to be Ben's journal. There are elements of magic realism in the text, and a few borrowings from science fiction, but futuristic fantasy is the book's basic character. It combines melancholy reflections on the passage of time with the author's mischievously idiosyncratic notions of what will survive Ragnarok. The list includes nagging wives, National Geographic, the North Shore commuter line, opportunistic crime, the pursuit of young girls by old boys, UPS, and the telephone, on which mechanical voices continue to order the pushing of buttons that lead ad infinitum to other mechanical voices. Ben considers history and golf games. He meditates on black holes and his health. He records weather and seasons with precision and lyrical appreciation. He observes that "if not magical, men are not much," and describes a corpse as "this slumped puddle of deactivated molecules." He becomes, without warning or explanation, a man of other times and places. Altogether, he is a fascinating, amusing, eloquent companion, and one feels genuine regret when the year, his journal, and with them Mr. Updike's novel come to an end. --The Atlantic Monthly, Phoebe-Lou Adams<br /><br />The branching imagination in this novel--call it Mr. Updike's art--is occupied with roads not taken, and some of them go back a long way, to the author of the Mark gospel, or to a pair of Egyptian tomb-robbers, or to a monk in the Dark Ages about to be extinguished by Norsemen. These transformations, or forkings, are daring; they also make tough going for a first-time reader. Yet when Ben, near the end of the novel, thinks that "the short view alone is bearable," we agree with him, partly because of the long views Mr. Updike takes in his narrative. --The Wall Street Journal, William H. Pritchard<br /><br />The future isn't what it used to be. A century ago futuristic novels were radiantly utopian, but as the 20th century clouded over, so did the fictional future.... (Updike's) most recent novel,<A HREF="/exec/obidos/ISBN=0449911217/${0}">In the Beauty of the Lilies, rendered four generations of 20th-century Americans with brilliant, Flemish-painting precision. But there was a dark undertone to that novel, andToward the End of Timepicks it up and runs with it all the way into the year 2020. --Entertainment Weekly<br /><br />Updike allows his protagonist some extensive theorizing about his alternate worlds. But, as with the oddly sporadic presentation of a post-nuclear future, we sense that the author is pointing elsewhere.... This makes for some fairly dry work. The balance between giving life to a story and talking at it leans to the side of talk--particularly since it is hard to provide vital distinctness to alternate worlds when you suggest that they may be mental constructs.... Yet, seen not for themselves but as part of Turnbull's aging struggle, the fantasy alternate worlds are truly affecting. Stripped of vitality and power, the failing protagonist makes a final grab for command by using the loopy metaphors of physics to declare reality for the cloudiness of his mind and desires. In his rage against the "dying of the light," he elevates the imminent end of his particular --Los Angeles Times Sunday Book Review, Richard Eder
The branching imagination in this novel--call it Mr. Updike's art--is occupied with roads not taken, and some of them go back a long way, to the author of the Mark gospel, or to a pair of Egyptian tomb-robbers, or to a monk in the Dark Ages about to be extinguished by Norsemen. These transformations, or forkings, are daring; they also make tough going for a first-time reader. Yet when Ben, near the end of the novel, thinks that "the short view alone is bearable," we agree with him, partly because of the long views Mr. Updike takes in his narrative. --The Wall Street Journal, William H. Pritchard
The future isn't what it used to be. A century ago futuristic novels were radiantly utopian, but as the 20th century clouded over, so did the fictional future.... (Updike's) most recent novel,In the Beauty of the Lilies, rendered four generations of 20th-century Americans with brilliant, Flemish-painting precision. But there was a dark undertone to that novel, andToward the End of Timepicks it up and runs with it all the way into the year 2020. --Entertainment Weekly
Updike allows his protagonist some extensive theorizing about his alternate worlds. But, as with the oddly sporadic presentation of a post-nuclear future, we sense that the author is pointing elsewhere.... This makes for some fairly dry work. The balance between giving life to a story and talking at it leans to the side of talk--particularly since it is hard to provide vital distinctness to alternate worlds when you suggest that they may be mental constructs.... Yet, seen not for themselves but as part of Turnbull's aging struggle, the fantasy alternate worlds are truly affecting. Stripped of vitality and power, the failing protagonist makes a final grab for command by using the loopy metaphors of physics to declare reality for the cloudiness of his mind and desires. In his rage against the "dying of the light," he elevates the imminent end of his particular time into the astrophysical hypothesis of the End of Time. --Los Angeles Times Sunday Book Review, Richard Eder--This text refers to theHardcoveredition.
