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David Foster Wallace Reviews John Updike’s ‘Toward the End of Time’ | Observer

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‘Toward the End of Time’ reads less like John Updike than like somebody doing a mean parody of John Updike.

For years, John Updike has been constructing protagonists who are basically all the same guy and who are all clearly stand-ins for the author himself. Photo by Ulf Andersen/Getty Images Mailer, Updike, Roth: The Great Male Narcissists who’ve dominated postwar realist fiction are now in their senescence, and it must seem to them no coincidence that the prospect of their own deaths appears backlit by the approaching millennium and online predictions of the death of the novel as we know it. When a solipsist dies, after all, everything goes with him. And no U.S. novelist has mapped the solip

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