Toward the End
of Time
(John Updike, 1997)
Margaret Atwood: "Toward the
End of Time'' is John Updike's 47th book, and it is deplorably good. If only he
would write a flagrant bomb! That would be news. But another excellently
written novel by an excellent novelist -- what can be said?
David Foster Wallace: It is, of the total 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.
---
Margaret Atwood: Like many late-20th-century
writers, Updike is fascinated with bodily goo, and by things that go yuck in
the night. The verbal pleasure he takes in describing the exact nature and
texture of Ben's searing and dribbly symptoms rivals Cormac McCarthy on
exploding skulls or Patricia Cornwell on decaying corpses.
David Foster Wallace: As were Freud’s, Mr. Updike’s big preoccupations have always been
with death and sex (not necessarily in that order).
---
Margaret Atwood: He's afraid of Doreen too, but she arouses mostly wistfulness. Through
her he has access to the lost prepubertal inexperienced self he once was, for
whom he feels a tense nostalgia.
David Foster Wallace: … and even more pages of Turnbull talking about sex and the imperiousness
of the sexual urge and detailing how he lusts after assorted secretaries and
neighbors and bridge partners and daughters-in-law and a little girl who’s part
of the group of young toughs he pays protection to, a 13-year-old whose breasts
-- "shallow taut cones tipped with honeysuckle-berry nipples” -- Turnbull
finally gets to fondle in the woods behind his house when his wife’s not
looking.
---
Margaret Atwood: Yet within an hour he's happily clearing off the porch, delighted by his
new orange plastic shovel and hymning the praises of the snow itself. ''Does
the appetite for new days ever really cease?'' he asks. Not for Ben Turnbull it
doesn't, and through all the tribulations that beset him it's this appetite --
his ability to be surprised, his childlike curiosity in himself and in what may
happen next -- that keeps him going.
David Foster Wallace: It’s not that Turnbull is stupid -- he can quote Kierkegaard and Pascal
on angst and allude to the deaths of Schubert and Mozart and distinguish
between a sinistrorse and a dextrorse Polygonum vine, etc. It’s that he
persists in the bizarre adolescent idea that getting to have sex with whomever
one wants whenever one wants is a cure for ontological despair.
---
Margaret Atwood: It's finally Ben's evenhandedness that confers on ''Toward the End of
Time'' its eerie ambiance, its ultrarealism, its air of a little corner of hell
as meticulously painted as a Dutch domestic interior. The light of his
intelligence falls alike on everything: on flowers, animals, grandchildren,
corpses, copulations; on ancient Egypt and plastic peanuts; on memory, disgust,
dread, lust and spiritual rapture.
David Foster Wallace: Though usually family men, they never really love anybody -- and,
though always heterosexual to the point of satyriasis, they especially don’t
love women. The very world around them, as beautifully as they see and describe
it, seems to exist for them only insofar as it evokes impressions and
associations and emotions inside the self.
---
Margaret Atwood: Updike can do anything he wants, and what he's wanted this time is
quintessence of mortality. [. . .] As a commentator, Ben is nothing if not
ruthless; but he's as ruthless with himself and his own body as he is with
everyone else, and with everyone else's body. Alongside the ruthlessness he
does manage, from time to time, a sort of wry tenderness. ''To be human,'' he
says, ''is still to be humbled by the flesh, to suffer and to die.''
David Foster Wallace: Mr. Updike, for example, has for years been constructing
protagonists who are basically all the same guy (see for example Rabbit
Angstrom, Dick Maple, Piet Hanema, Henry Bech, Rev. Tom Marshfield, Roger’s
Version's “Uncle Nunc”) and who are all clearly stand-ins for the author
himself. [. . .] [N]o U.S. novelist has mapped the solipsist’s terrain better
than John Updike, whose rise in the 60′s and 70′s established him as both
chronicler and voice of probably the single most self-absorbed generation since
Louis XIV. [. . .] But I think the major reason so many of my
generation dislike Mr. Updike and the other G.M.N.’s has to do with these
writers’ radical self-absorption, and with their uncritical celebration of this
self-absorption both in themselves and in their characters.
15 years
later …
Wolf of
Wall Street
(Martin Scorcese, 2013)
Richard Brody: It’s as pure and harrowing a last shot as those of John
Ford’s “7 Women”
and Carl Theodor Dreyer’s “Gertrud”
-- an image that, if by some terrible misfortune were to be Scorsese’s last,
would rank among the most harshly awe-inspiring farewells of the cinema.
Stephanie Zacharek: Martin Scorsese's “The Wolf of Wall Street” is
the kind of movie directors make when they wield money, power, and a not
inconsiderable degree of arrogance.
---
Richard Brody: It’s thrilling for Jordan Belfort to use and abuse this
power, and it’s thrilling for us to watch -- and his understanding that his
actions are wrong only adds to the thrill.
Stephanie Zacharek: But if there's nothing pleasurable or revelatory in watching these
guys act like cavemen who have just discovered women, drugs, and cash, it's
even less fun to see them get caught.
---
Richard Brody: Instead of fitting his performance to a preconception of
Belfort, DiCaprio seems to be improvising on the theme of Belfort, spinning out
an electric repertory of gestures and inflections. By being, more than ever,
himself on-screen, DiCaprio realizes his role more deeply than ever before.
Stephanie Zacharek: DiCaprio's Jordan is manic in a studied way; he's always leaping onto
desks or writhing on floors.
---
Richard Brody: But the exceptional audacity -- and the highly crafted, deliriously
confected intricacy -- with which Scorsese calibrates the thrill of corruption ...
Stephanie Zacharek: Scorsese is one of the few great old-guard filmmakers with the clout
to make movies on this scale, and this picture -- dreary, self-evident, too repetitive to be much fun even
as satire -- is what he comes up
with?
---
Richard Brody: It’s like mainlining cinema for three hours, and I wouldn’t
have wanted it a minute shorter.
Stephanie Zacharek: But as a highly detailed portrait of true-life corruption and bad
behavior in the financial sector, “Wolf” is
pushy and hollow.
---
Richard Brody: Anyone who needs “The Wolf of Wall Street” to explain that
the stock-market fraud and personal irresponsibility it depicts are morally
wrong is dead from the neck up; but anyone who can’t take vast pleasure in its
depiction of delinquent behavior is dead from the neck down.
Stephanie Zacharek: It's self-conscious and devoid of passion, and there's no radiant
star at its center.
----
Richard Brody: “The Wolf of Wall Street” is the first modern movie about
the world of finance because it situates money in the so-called libidinal economy.
Stephanie Zacharek: … but DiCaprio's turn might be more effective if he hadn't
just played Jay Gatsby, in a much better performance, earlier this
year. Both Gatsby and
Jordan are strivers and fakers, but Gatsby aspires to elegance, not excess, and
even then his greatest hope is that it can buy him love.
---
Richard Brody: What lifts Scorsese and his cast and crew to such heights of
creation is the deep, strong, and volatile source material -- not merely
Belfort’s life, deeds, and book, but the vast internal energies that they draw
on, and that Scorsese and company face up to with an unrestrained fascination
and find echoes of, at great risk, in themselves.
Stephanie Zacharek: Scorsese, on the other hand, belabors every angle of this lukewarm
morality tale.
---
Richard Brody: Within the movie’s roiling, riotous turbulence is an
Olympian detachment, a grand and cold consideration of life from a
contemplative distance, as revealed in the movie’s last shot, which puts “The
Wolf of Wall Street” squarely in the realm of the late film, with its lofty
vision of ultimate things.
Stephanie Zacharek: “Wolf” is [. .
.] like a three-hour cold call from the boiler room that leaves you wondering,
"What have I just been sold?"
---
Richard Brody: Scorsese puts the film’s viewers face to face with
themselves, charges us with compensating for our lack of imagination and fatal
ambition through contact with the wiles of a master manipulator.
Stephanie Zacharek: Long after we've gotten the picture, Scorsese and cinematographer Rodrigo Prieto are
still presenting each new, depraved revelation as if it were an infant
water-nymph on a lily pad, a thing of wonder they'd never seen before.
Momento Mori -- but first carpe diem (Margaret Atwood)
John Updike, Champion Literary Phallocrat, Drops One (David Foster Wallace)
The Wild, Brilliant Wolf of Wall Street (Richard Brody)
The Lasting Power of the Wolf of Wall Street (Richard Brody)
The Wolf of Wall Street has everything money can buy -- but still comes up empty (Stephanie Zacharek)
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