John Updike, Toward the End of Time

John Updike, Toward the End of Time. All right, John, here's the deal. I love you, but I can't keep doing this anymore. I don't know why I keep reading your often mediocre and sometimes horrible novels. This book was generally muddled and and sort of limping along, but it was the combination of lazy interpretations of cosmology and particle physics and the absolutely florid and often astoundingly gross descriptions (you deserved this award, and let's leave it at that) that forced me to this. Your lovely language and gift for recognizable and heartbreaking description (and let's face it, when you're good, you're really really good) just aren't worth it right now. I'm not reading anything of yours for a year. Not even that nice volume of short stories I found. A year from now, I'll pretend like this never happened and start over again with your Rabbit books.