DATE: Sunday, October 5, 1997               TAG: 9710020685

SECTION: COMMENTARY              PAGE: J2   EDITION: FINAL 

TYPE: Book Review

SOURCE: BY MICHAEL PEARSON 

                                            LENGTH:   73 lines

IN THE FUTURE, A CONTINUING STRUGGLE FOR MEANING

TOWARD THE END OF TIME

JOHN UPDIKE

Alfred A. Knopf. 342 pp. $25.

Toward the End of Time is John Updike's 48th book, his 18th novel. Of course, this alone is worthy of note, but even more interesting is that Updike is that rarity in contemporary American literature - a serious writer who, although known as a novelist, works in a variety of genres, is prolific and has both a wide readership and the attention of the critics. Updike has written a play, a memoir, collections of short stories, books of poetry, works of criticism (everything from book reviews to a book on golf), children's stories and novels.

There haven't been that many American writers who have achieved both popular success and serious critical attention - James Fenimore Cooper, Mark Twain, Ernest Hemingway and a scattering of others. Updike may one day join such a list and be remembered, along with John Cheever, as one of the best chroniclers of the post-World War II suburban malaise.

In Toward the End of Time Updike offers another vision of ex-urban angst, this one set in 2020 after an earth-shattering war between China and the United States. The main character, Ben Turnbull, an aptly named 66-year-old retired investment counselor, is as successful and as lost as Harry Angstrom of Updike's 1981 Pulizter Prize-winning Rabbit is Rich.

Turnbull's own confusion and anxiety about growing old are reflected in every aspect of the world around him, a world in chaos. The population of the earth has been decimated, scrip has been issued to replace the valueless dollar, the government of the United States is defunct, and Turnbull hangs on by a cynical thread in his country home outside of Boston. He pays protection money, first to a pair of middle-aged entrepreneurs and then to a flock of pre-pubescent teen-agers, as he watches with a jaded eye the world unravel.

This is Turnbull's narrative, the tale of his thoughtful passivity in response to his wife's mindless survivalism, the story of his affairs with a woman half his age and another barely in her teens, the account of his physical deterioration and the sickness unto death that brings him back to life. Turnbull's narrative gets entangled in his recollections of history and science as his thoughts drift indiscernibly from his own predicament into the stories of the apostles, Irish monks, or Egyptian grave robbers. Like the deer on his property that his wife, Gloria, demands he kill, Turnbull seems wounded and vulnerable, struggling to regain a sense of place.

Turnbull's story, finally, is about lost time, about the loss of time. It is concerned with the dreams we shed ``one by one'' and where that leaves our souls. In one respect Toward the End of Time is a traditional science-fiction novel: It asks the big questions about our place in the universe - ``But why did nothingness ever leave home, as it were? What placed the stars and galaxies, the quasars and black holes and oceans and neutrons out there? Whence this inordinate amount of sparkling dust?''

But the heart of the matter here is time itself, and Updike is at his best in this occasionally sluggish novel when he uses his considerable descriptive powers to make time stand still, showing us morning engendering ``beneath its surface a thousand forked glints of illuminated bare twigs, an electric crackle of white sunlight.'' Updike is a masterful stylist who can bring the unnoticed details of the world to brilliant life.

Now and again, though, his stream of poetry can turn to mush: ``Menstrual fluid, epidermal oils, semen - all such effluvia in overflowing supply.''

But most often Toward the End of Time works as a painful and eloquent reminder of the frailty of our bodies and the strength of our spirits. MEMO: Michael Pearson teaches creative writing and literature at Old

Dominion University. His latest book is the critical study, ``John

McPhee.'' ILLUSTRATION: Photo

John Updike

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