This piece appeared in the Times Literary Supplement on the 06 February 1998

A week after Independence Day 2020, America watches as an enormous annular alien spacecraft approaches Earth, gently encircles or embraces the whole planet, then drifts away like a smoke ring, leaving only a sense of wonder. During this event, the narrator of John Updike's eighteenth novel tells us: "a creamy weightless sense of irreversible reassurance was flooding me . . . . I would not die, I realised; all would be well . . . . Time was a provision that would be rescinded; its tragedy was born of misperception, an upper limit of conceptual ability such as keeps the bee bumbling among the clover and the faithful dog trotting . . . at his master's heels." It is a strange, tender moment which lasts no more than a page of two, by the end of which scepticism has been carefully reasserted; but what was it doing in a John Updike novel in the first place?

Ben Turnbull, a retired investment counsellor, has "cut the wires" on his old life, so he can "get back to nature and my own human basics", before nature cuts the wires on him. He lives with his wife, Gloria, on Boston's North Shore, in an America at once irreversibly changed and somehow completely the same as the one we know from every other Updike novel. Ben watches the year go by. He writes a journal, introducing himself to us through a succession of beautiful, rather overdriven little images which he then pries at fussily, until the cogs drop out of them and roll away across the floor. A new day is "like a fresh meal brightly served in a hospital to a patient with a dwindling appetite". Almost before we have time to like this, he qualifies: "And yet does the appetite for new days ever really cease?" A few paragraphs later, he is spreading "the mail, the main spiritual meal of my day, upon the kitchen table". But then this meal is less actually less spiritual, he thinks, than "social" or "contactual".

Each evaporation or lessening of perception accomplished in this way furthers our impression of an ageing mind. But the technique has another effect. Things are, things aren't; they might be this, they might be that. Choices and decisions are involved here, and we had better keep that in mind. Sure enough, Updike is soon treating us to an efficient summary of quantum indeterminacy and its position - or rather one of its possible positions - in modern cosmological theory. Measure the position of a particle, and its momentum becomes unknowable; measure its momentum, and the reverse occurs. At the point of measurement, the wave function collapses. The universe splits. Though the world we know contains the measurement we made, the other potential states of the system - comprising particle, measuring apparatus and observer - may continue elsewhere. As measurements cascade, so do possible worlds, themselves spilling further worlds to burn and cascade like the sparks of God. Ben Turnbull finds this infinite firework display "intellectually repulsive", but he and his author already have a use for it. Musing on the word "perhaps", they decide it is "like the little fork in reality when a quantum measurement is made". In fact, the operative word here is less "perhaps" than "like". "Like" is the one to watch.

Ben's attempts to seal the leaks of old age are agitated but essentially feeble. His wife, by contrast, is filled with a vinegary determination to keep what's hers. Gloria, a keen gardener, seeks order; Turnbull is half in love with easeful entropy. Gloria acts; Turnbull seems reluctant to stir. It is a balanced situation, until a deer from Turnbull's eleven-acre wood begins eating the euonymus hedge in Gloria's garden. Gloria wants the deer killed. Ben would prefer to have sexual intercourse with it. Pathways branch suddenly. Ben may or may not have shot Gloria instead of the deer; the deer may or may not have metamorphosed into Deirdre, a salty little prostitute who first comes to serve Ben's fantasies every two or three days, then takes over the house. When Deirdre runs off with the local protection racketeer, leaving only a delightfully postliterate letter and a memory of "the girlish secrets between her legs", Gloria returns im-mediately - or, rather, it seems she has never left. House and garden are returned to order, but now squatters infest the woods . . . .

Such jumps or glitches are thoughtfully signalled for us by the author. ("It was a moment of measurement", says Ben: "I felt the universe crackle and branch.") The equilibrium of the evolving narrative is punctuated further by visions of his life as an Egyptian tomb raider, a follower of St Paul, a ninth-century Irish monk, a concentration-camp guard. These simple rants or reveries allow the team of Turnbull and Updike to relieve passing tensions which have only fragile bearing on their theme. Altogether, the effect is less of quantum branching than the onset of a neurological disorder. A fine sense of panic is communicated - Updike Man, brought finally against the stop and still looking for a way out, beats his tacky wings against the infinite, a kind of postmodern Pincher Martin. Essentially, though, weird science has been enlisted to rationalize a mess, or to service themes which really don't need that kind of support.

In a recent interview, Updike described the book as "my attempt at science fiction, which I read a lot as a young man". That genre - as he certainly knows - is never so overtly metaphorical as this. Its surfaces, slick or matt according to fashion, are never less than convoluted, it is an appetite unsatisfied by simple associations. Science fiction, Venus flytrap for the unwary, iridescent jaws lethal with raw-meat pheromones, has a history of swallowing good novelists, from Thomas Pynchon through Ian McEwan to Will Self. Even the coolest struggle free looking dishevelled and provincial. In Toward the End of Time, Updike, like McEwan before him, settles for the most literalistic way of importing quantum physics into narrative and adds himself to the list of victims.

"Perhaps" isn't quite enough, and neither is the curiously absent-minded future Updike proposes. This is a world in which Ben Turnbull, despite war, currency collapse and the replacement of government by gangsterism, can still live the protected life of a retired businessman; a world in which a war between China and the United States is barely brought to our notice; a world we penetrate as far as page 88 before Ben thinks fit to draw to our attention the fact that: "With the plains a radioactive dustbowl, decim-ated Midwestern cities have been living on truckloads of New England mussels and apples from New York State." This is a world in which a whole new form of life, full of Ballard-ian promise and neo-Darwinian vigour, has emerged from sumps of industrial waste. Yet all the old indices of suburbia remain conveniently in place. The malls are still open, water comes out of Gloria's "brass, Swiss, inhumanly streamlined" bathroom fixtures, UPS still delivers the mail, Ben's life is relatively unmarked. He visits his children and grandchildren. He plays golf with his doctor. 2020 is left to fend for itself, wavering in and out of focus, intermittent, vague, notional, looking less like a future than an attempt to ignore one.

For Updike, of course, the only future is the inner landscape of Updike Man, delivered here with much of the verve and cleverness we expect, the swoops of lyricism and cacophony, the broadcasts of disgust and joy; adventures of the suburban Neanderthal, encounters with sex, marriage, money and a self-disgust as unrelinquishable as the morning shave - the "chores of living". Clearly, Ben Turnbull's views are not the author's; equally clearly, the author hasn't found it too hard to articulate views like these, in book after book, over the years. Ben Turnbull plays a bad hand at bridge, and his thoughts are all of shit. In a dream of sex, he finds himself "obliged to defecate at a dinner party, in close proximity to the bejewelled hostess". He travels to Boston, "to conduct a little business at the old stand". His former partners are cordial but harried. Competition is everywhere stiffer than it used to be, but Ben is safe. Ben has made his pile. On the way home, he sees his own eye reflected in the window of the train. It is like the eye of a deer, perhaps, "fearful and alert". A woman snaps her bubblegum at him, a "casual uncalled-for protrusion of insolent mock-nakedness pinker and more blatant than an exposed breast". Later, he has fantasies of piercing the deer's eye with a pin. For now, the woman shows him her pink bubble, then wolfs it back, "seething with bacteria, into her oral cavity". All of this, money as sex, sex as money, sex as defecation, finds its clearest expression in his transactions with Deirdre; he loves it when Deirdre bargains with him in bed, 300 "welders" - the post-disaster Massachusetts scrip for access to "the lovable little flesh-knot of her anus, suggestive of a healed scar".

Around them as they copulate, the strip malls and waste dumps endlessly revolve, the one populated by retirees in "a daze of early-Alzheimer's", the other by silent metallic lifeforms with miniature chainsaws for heads. This "dwindled, senile world", this "blasted depopulated planet", isn't Earth, 2020, but Ben Turnbull, sixty-six. The wreckage of the Midwest is the wreckage of his body. The cheap poetics of "quantum branching" is what he has left after the sex has finished. The darkness piles up in the corners. Feeling himself drift away from life "on a limp tether", he marvels at Gloria's vitality and involvement. He is full of a vague dread; at night, his bed seems like a slanting surface, "from which I might fall into an abyss". He remember his boyhood in the Berkshires, but forgets his grandson's birthday. "As I age", he admits, "holes in my memory develop, and because they are holes it is difficult to gauge their size." Despite this, he is still able to see himself as "an insignificant insect rapturously enrolled, for these brief bright instants of my life, in a churning, shining, chirping, birthing, singing, dying cosmic excess. From the quasars to the rainbow shimmer on my dragonfly wings, everything was an extravagance engraved upon the obsidian surface of an infrangible, eternal darkness." Winter comes, and with it diagnosis. Ben, as he guessed, though he couldn't allow himself to see it, has cancer of the prostate, that organ which has dogged his tracks all novel long. The urologist is optimistic. "Not quite a piece of cake, Ben", he promises, "but close to it. A bagel, let's say." Things don't work out that well, and within a page or two, cored and cathetered, reeking of urine, Ben has settled down to the last lap of his journey Toward the End of Time.

Push through the over-clinical sex and under-clinical science fiction, and you conclude that this novel is about death. Just as you have pushed a little harder and are thinking that in someone else's hands it might almost have been a novel about life, Gloria finally locates a professional deer-hunter. His name is John, and he has a saintly look. After patient nights in a hide, he kills the deer with a crossbow bolt, lifts her single-handedly on to his truck with the "old fireman's squat-and-hoist". She lies there on the flatbed in front of Ben and Gloria, her body "long as a lover's beside you in bed", and at that point, you begin to wonder if Deirdre the dear, the lean-bodied quantum whore, wasn't so much a symbol of life, or even of Ben's life (though that's closer), as a symbol of Ben. All the time he was fucking Deirdre - and, one Deirdre being very much like another as far as Updike Man is concerned, that means the whole of his adult life - might he have been fucking himself? What a question! Push on through to this discovery and, like all Updike's work, Toward the End of Time is a novel of narcissism.

Copyright Times Literary Supplement 1998