Bech Is Back [Mass Market Paperback]

John Updike (Author)

Book Description

Publication Date: August 12, 1983

In this follow-up to Bech: A Book, Henry Bech, the priapic, peripatetic, and unproductive Jewish American novelist, returns with seven more chapters from his mock-heroic life. He turns fifty in a confusing blend of civic and erotic circumstances while publicizing himself in Australia and Canada. He marries a shiksa and travels with her to Israel, where she falls in love with the land, and to Scotland, where he does. And—sweating buckets! thinking big! minting miracles!—he writes an ingeniously tawdry bestseller. Bech’s aesthetic and moral embarrassments reveal acid truths about both his trade and our times.


From the Trade Paperback edition.

--This text refers to the Kindle Edition edition.

Editorial Reviews

Review

“Bech is back all right, but only after paying a large and painful price. . . . Updike reflects in these pages on the odd and unsettling ways in which art can impinge upon life, the ways in which a book acquires a life of its own that seems wholly unrelated to that of the person who created it, the ways in which celebrity separates those upon whom it is bestowed from reality.”—The Washington Post
 
“Mr. Updike finds full scope for his gifts here: for sly and cheerfully malicious pensées on contemporary literary life; for busy observations on human behavior.”—The New Yorker
 
“[Updike] at the top of his craft.”—Time --This text refers to the Kindle Edition edition.

From the Inside Flap

The renowned Henry Bech is now fifty years old. In this wonderful classic novel, Bech reflects on his fame, travels the world, marries an Episcopalian divorcée from Westchester, and--surprise to all--writes a book that becomes a runaway bestseller. If you've never read Updike before, there's no better place to start. If you've read him for years, you'll be delightfully reminded of John Updike's rightful place in the pantheon of quintessential American writers. --This text refers to the Paperback edition.

See all Editorial Reviews

Product Details

• Mass Market Paperback: 195 pages
• Publisher: Fawcett; 1st Ballantine Bks Ed., Oct. 1983 edition (August 12, 1983)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0449202771
• ISBN-13: 978-0449202777
• Product Dimensions: 8.9 x 5.6 x 0.6 inches
• Shipping Weight: 0.8 ounces
• Average Customer Review: 3.0 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (3 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #8,939,442 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

More About the Author

John Updike was born in 1932, in Shillington, Pennsylvania. He graduated from Harvard College in 1954, and spent a year in Oxford, England, at the Ruskin School of Drawing and Fine Art. From 1955 to 1957 he was a member of the staff of The New Yorker, and since 1957 lived in Massachusetts. He was the father of four children and the author of more than fifty books, including collections of short stories, poems, essays, and criticism. His novels won the Pulitzer Prize (twice), the National Book Award, the National Book Critics Circle Award, the Rosenthal Award, and the Howells Medal. A previous collection of essays, Hugging the Shore, received the 1983 National Book Critics Circle Award for criticism. John Updike died on January 27, 2009, at the age of 76.

Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

3 of 3 people found the following review helpful:

3.0 out of 5 stars An entertaining, and somewhat revealing, novella, January 1, 1999

By 

[e-mail] (Portland, Oregon) - See all my reviews

This review is from: Bech Is Back (Paperback)

"Bech is Back," is the middle entry in a series of novellas in which John Updike exposes a bit of the personal- and professional-doings of the contemporary writer's life. It's light, and he's only willing to take us so far with what we guess must be re-worked anecdotes and foibles from his own experience. The writing is classic Updike, having the rich word choice, wonderful descriptive detail and unique observation we've come to expect -- along with the usual amount of sexual reference to keep the reader engaged, even when it all gets tedious. Like so many of Updike's other works, it concludes with a mixed bag of outcomes for his characters, and for the reader with thin skin, it comes off simply as a jaded unravelling of fortunes. Updike mixes the hilarious with his usual dose of cynical self-absorption, and the currency, sex and humor make for a good afternoon's entertainment.

5 of 6 people found the following review helpful:

4.0 out of 5 stars How To Write a Modern Novel, August 5, 2000

By 

Tom Adair - See all my reviews

This review is from: Bech Is Back (Paperback)

First write a short story (all the time making sure it will be published in The New Yorker or Playboy); if it works, write another one, using the same character or characters; when you have written three or four of these, start thinking about grouping them together in book-form (remember: publish and republish your work as much as possible); then write a couple of cementing 'chapters' and offer it to the public as a novel. This is how John Updike has written (among other things) Bech is Back - his second book about a Jewish-American literary novelist prone to writer's block. The advantages of using the compositional method described above are clear: instead of that heavily programmatic, overdetermined, obsolete thing we call 'plot', one gets instead a sequence of snapshots, or a gallery of pictures. We get a book that has obviously evolved organically over time, pushing out roots into only the most fertile soil. We loose old-fashioned unity of design, but we do not miss it. This is writing like a cubist: the by turns judicious and whimsical assembling of fragments of truth, rather than the facile pursuit of an impossible illusion of coherent 'wholeness'. Not a word is wasted in this short, smart, clever, muscular punch of a book.

4 of 9 people found the following review helpful:

2.0 out of 5 stars Tired, July 2, 1999

By A Customer

This review is from: Bech Is Back (Paperback)

Oh God, more of this snotty New Yorker kind of humor. Grab some Perrier and chuckle at these Babbitlike witty amusements.