SOURCE: “Deer John,” in Nation, November 3, 1997, pp. 62–3.

In the following review, LeClair offers a positive assessment of Toward the End of Time.

After putting Rabbit to rest, John Updike ranged far abroad in Brazil and drilled deep into history in Memories of the Ford Administration and In the Beauty of the Lilies. While these were adventurous novels, I think Updike missed his long-running index to the American present and decided that Rabbit's end was untimely. In Toward the End of Time, Updike replaces the once poor, finally rich and always sex-obsessed Rabbit with a similar character, Ben Turnbull. At 67, Turnbull has outlived Rabbit by eleven years but in that extra time has lost emotional contact with his numerous progeny, developed prostate cancer, been deprived of golf and come to suspect that his wife wants him dead.

About once a decade some well-intentioned editor sends me a novel with...