Bech at Bay

Starred review from September 28, 1998
At this juncture of his life, "semiobscure" literary writer Henry Bech (Bech: A Book; Bech Is Back) may be "at bay"--attacked by fellow writers, sued for libel, derided by critics, consumed by worry about his place in the literary pantheon--but his creator, Updike, is writing with undiminished energy and a bellyfull of chuckles. In five interrelated sections that move backward and forward through time, from 1986, when the 63-year-old Bech is again in Prague, to 1999, when he accepts the Nobel Prize with his eight-month-old daughter in his arms, Bech pursues his craft, an assortment of women, vengeance and peace of mind, veering between misery and elation, bathing in self-doubt or preening egotistically. Updike uses this opportunity to air issues besetting the arts in the 1990s--both the factionalism within the literary community and the dwindling interest in the arts without. Updike evokes Bech's Jewish persona with gusto, endowing him with a Yiddish vocabulary, self-deprecation, irony, guilt and a sense of being an outsider in society despite his acclaim. The most entertaining section, one step away from farce, is "Bech Noir," in which the writer, with the help of his young lover and a computer, systematically does away with the critics who have disparaged his work. Equally amusing is Bech's stint as president of an august literary society in "Bech Presides": Updike drolly implants recognizable traits of living writers in the members of the Forty, and extends the joke by interpolating references to Pynchon, Salinger, Gaddis, Sontag and others of his contemporaries. In this and other sections, he has fun reflecting the backbiting and jealousy of the "Manhattan intelligentsia, a site saturated in poisonous envy and reflexive intolerance." While not a "big" book for Updike, this is an insightful and amusing look at the American literary scene. Editor, Judith Jones; first serial to the New Yorker; simultaneous Random House audio.

June 1, 1998
In his 49th book, Updike returns with Henry Bech, the middling Jewish American writer he first introduced in Bech: A Book. This time, Bech gets an unexpected award--a Nobel.

August 1, 1998
As the protagonist ages in Updike's familiar cycle of novels about Rabbit Angstrom, so ages Henry Bech, Jewish writer from New York and "hero" of "Bech: A Book" (1970) and "Bech Is Back" (1982). Although being greatly put-upon is Bech's constant status, he continues to muddle through; in the last episode here, in fact, he is awarded the Nobel Prize. (Although the announcement is met with "a storm of protest.") But this crowning achievement is preceded by Bech's sinking to a new low when he inaugurates a campaign to "off" critics who have done his books wrong; however, Bech's fate is always up and down. In one episode, he goes to Prague, where he is valued as an important writer, and in another, he is sued for libel in L.A. for an inflammatory article he authored. The Bech books are not truly novels but, rather, short story sequences, and familiarity with the two previous books is only advisable, not necessary, since readers who have not read the first two do not run any risk of not "getting" Bech. He is here in the third book in all his frayed grandeur. Bech is Updike's alter ego, a mouthpiece for Updike's often sarcastic, even caustic, insight into writers and the writing life. (The role of Rabbit, Updike's other alter ego, personifies the author's obsession with social attitudes and sexual mores.) Updike's style is never more jubilantly elaborate than in a Bech book, and his intelligence never more provocatively displayed. ((Reviewed August 1998))(Reprinted with permission of Booklist, copyright 1998, American Library Association.)