Amazon.com Review
After recounting almost every detail of
Rabbit Angstrom's mental, spiritual, and (especially) erotic life for almost four decades, John Updike laid his brilliant creation to rest in 1990. Another of his ongoing characters, however, has remained at large--Henry Bech. In
Bech at Bay, Updike revives his philandering Jewish American novelist for one last trip through that wringer we call the writer's life. Like his creator, Bech is getting on in years. And although age cannot wither his considerable sexual appetites nor custom stale his cantankerous charms, he is uncomfortably aware of his mortality. In the first episode, during a visit to pre-
perestroika Czechoslovakia, the "semi-obscure American author" is taken to view Kafka's grave, and the sight gives him the willies: "It all struck Bech as dumbfoundingly blunt and engimatic, banal and moving. Such blankness, such stony and peaceable reification, waits for us at the bottom of things." His own proximity to the bottom of things is what gives
Bech at Bay an extra dose of sobriety. For the first time, Updike's ingratiating impersonation of a Jew--who shares the author's lapidary style, sizable nose, and not much else--is not only supremely amusing but moving.
Which isn't to say that all is gloomy in Bechville. Updike keeps things breezy throughout, as his hero is seduced and subpoenaed, excoriated and honored, finally, with the Nobel Prize. Only once does the author lose his footing, with "Bech Noir": this world-class nebbish just doesn't cut it as serial killer, and even the prose goes untypically to pot. But otherwise the book is a delight, venting all the nastiness about literary life that Updike always purges from his own more genteel (not to mention Gentile) persona. It's also an elegant meditation on literary being and nothingness. "A character," we are told, "suffers from the fear that he will become boring to the author, who will simply let him drop, without so much as a terminal illness or a dramatic tumble down the Reichenbach Falls in the arms of Professor Moriarty. For some years now, Bech had felt his author wanting to set him aside, to get him off the desk forever." Here Updike proves himself Nabokov's equal in the metafictional sweepstakes--and makes us hope that his doppelgänger will get one last reprieve. --James Marcus
--This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title.
From Publishers Weekly
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.
Copyright 1998 Reed Business Information, Inc.
--This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title.
