John Updike’s new novel is dividing the critics. He spoke to Joanna Coles
Waiting for the lift with John Updike at his Park Avenue hotel, he catches sight of himself in the chrome doors, his face a beige pancake from an earlier television appearance. “Oh dear,” he giggles brightly, his jaunty green eyes staring back at him. “I’m looking rather chalky aren’t I?”
Updike is old. Or at least significantly older than the writer who produced the brilliant Rabbit series, Couples and The Witches of Eastwick. His latest novel, Toward the End of Time (Hamish Hamilton), is in part a surreal voyage to a post-nuclear United States recovering from war with China, and in part a voyage to the centre of Ben Turnbull, a 66-year-old retired banker living in Massachusetts, absorbed by his encroaching physical disintegration and impotence.
As always there are liberal sprinklings of Updikean sex. Various feminist readers have already accused him of chauvinism, pointing to his descriptions of sex with a young prostitute (“presenting me with the glazed semi-rounds of her tight young buttocks … the lovable little flesh-knot of her anus, suggestive of a healed scar”) and his account of Turnbull’s fumblings with a 13-year-old.
Though his features have long been chiselled into literature’s Mount Rushmore, Updike’s reputation has taken a battering of late and this, his 17th novel, has received decidedly mixed reviews. Writing in The New York Times, Margaret Atwood pronounced it “deplorably good”. In The New York Observer, David Foster Wallace declared: “It is, of the 25 Updike books I’ve read, far and away the worst, a novel so mind-bendingly clunky and self-indulgent that it’s hard to believe the author let it be published in this kind of shape.”
Oh dear. Settled safely on the sofa in Updike’s hotel room, I am on the verge of asking Updike about these reviews when something catches my eye. Lying under the coffee table between us is a pair of worn underpants.
This is an unwelcome intimacy and, given the book’s infatuation with bodily functions, I find myself alarmed. Should I pick them up and cheerfully throw them in a bathroomly direction, or discreetly nudge them out of view with my foot? Instead, momentarily thrown, I hear myself asking him about a line in the first chapter which reads: “Rapacity, competition, desperation, death to other living things; the forces that make the world go round.” Does he really believe this?
“I think life has gotten much more brutish,” he remarks, his white hair and dark suit settling into the sofa. “As religion’s sanction for selflessness fades, I think people are hard-pressed to think of reasons to be selfless, and the sense of life as a struggle permeates.”
In Toward the End of Time, that brutishness envelops everything, the protection services which have replaced the police and, of course, sex – one of Updike’s omnipresent themes. Does he enjoy writing about sex? “It’s very healing, almost as healing as the act of sex itself …
“Funnily enough, as I was writing the book I wasn’t aware there was a lot of sex in it, but it’s been reviewed as a sexy book – and with indignation!” Indignation? “That there’s so much sex in this old fellow, horny Turnbull, and by proxy, me.”
And? “I’m taking the writer’s route,” he chuckles darkly, “I do and can hide behind him. He and I share some things …”
Like a penchant for 13-year-old breasts which Turnbull fondles? “Writing a book is a very private act, you’re not very inhibited, so it seemed to me very plausible.”
It may be a private act, but publishing makes it public. “Yes, that’s the paradox. Mmm, but I don’t think about readers or reviews at all. I mean, Ben is a typical human male. Sex dies hard; even when the apparatus of sex fails, the psychological apparatus is still in place. He still wants affection, he still wants love. Men are rovers I think, in their minds and bodies, you know, a different biological mission.”
He’s beginning to sound like one of those right-wing Christians who recently marched on Washington promising to repent of their wandering ways and retake control of the family. “You can’t knock the cause,” he retorts. “If we are to have a society at all, men must become civilised; tame their anarchic, savage urges. All heterosexual males to some extent compromise. They give up some of our theoretical freedom for the joys of stable family life.”
Does he sleep well? He pauses: “I wouldn’t say I’m relaxed as I ought to be. I’ve slept very well for the last 20 years, but I seem to be nervous lately.” About the book’s reception, or something deeper? My question is prompted by the description of Ben Turnbull waking “with something undigestible gnawing my stomach”.
“It might be writing this book, which bears the sores of the elderly,” Updike says flatly. “I never thought of myself as old until I wrote this book about an old man, and then I realised I’m only a year younger than Ben Turnbull. I can’t believe this much of my life is over. I used to look at people my age and I would think: ‘How can they stand being that close to death without screaming in terror?’ And now I’m of that age. In some odd way you adjust to the proximity of death. But something else in you fights it.”
We finish up by talking about what he’s reading. “Wallace Stevens, and I finished The Sound and the Fury, which I began 40 years ago.”
As I stand up to go, he stands too, and catches sight of his underpants. “Oh God,” he cries, scooping them up and feverishly stuffing them into his suitcase. “How careless of me. I do hope it’s not psychic litter.”