pantsfarm

I’ve been reading through David Foster Wallace’s (wiki, fan site) book of collected essays Consider the Lobster (wiki) and am currently in the middle of the essay “Certainly the End of Something or Other, One Would Sort of Have to Think” re John Updike’s “Toward the End of Time”. I haven’t read any Updike but I did chuckle a couple times reading through it so far.

Just today at lunch, I read this interesting passage:

I’m guessing that for the young educated adults of the sixties and seventies, for whom the ultimate horror was the hypocritical conformity and repression of their own parents’ generation, Updike’s evection of the libidinous self appeared refreshing and even heroic. But young adults of the nineties – many of whom are, of course, the children of all the impassioned infidelities and divorces Updike wrote about so beautifully, and who got to watch all this brave new individualism and sexual freedom deteriorate into the joyless and anomic self-indulgence of the Me Generation – today’s subforties have very different horrors, prominent among which are anomie and solipsism and a peculiarly American loneliness: the prospect of dying without having loved something more than yourself. Ben Turnbull, the narrator of Updike’s latest novel, is sixty-six years old and heading for just such a death, and he’s shitlessly scared. Like so many of Updike’s protagonists, though, Turnbull seems scared of all the wrong things.