Complete Henry Bech [Paperback]

John Updike (Author)

Product Details

• Paperback
• Publisher: NY (1980)
• ASIN: B000N6R2Y8
• Average Customer Review: 4.2 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (5 customer reviews)

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

10 of 11 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars "Must" reading for all John Updike fans, May 21, 2001

By 

Midwest Book Review (Oregon, WI USA) - See all my reviews

This review is from: The Complete Henry Bech (Everyman's Library) (Hardcover)

Henry Bech is John Updike's playfully irreverent alter ego and has charmed readers with aesthetic dithering and a seemingly inexhaustible libido. Now all of Updike's Henry Bech stories have been compiled in one volume, including the final, series-capping story "His Oeuvre". This outstanding Everyman's Library edition of The Complete Henry Bech is "must" reading for all John Updike fans and a very highly recommended addition to school and community library literary collections.

7 of 9 people found the following review helpful:

4.0 out of 5 stars Updike is better than Bech, October 20, 2004

By 

Shalom Freedman "Shalom Freedman" (Jerusalem,Israel) - See all my reviews
(TOP 1000 REVIEWER)   

This review is from: The Complete Henry Bech (Everyman's Library) (Hardcover)

Updike's Jewish alter ego is an extension of his imagination and identity. He recognizes and absorbs the ' identity ' of his major rivals of the time Bellow and Roth and shows he also can be them and be that. But a projection however clever does not in this case have the power of what is closer to him, with him. And there is greater authenticity and strength in the 'Rabbit Books'.
I have I think also an objection which only a minority of readers will share. Bech is a pasteboard Jew who has no real deep Jewish knowledge or identity. This does not mean characters like him do not exist, or Updike had no right to create him. It does mean that those of us looking for some depth when they meet a Jewish intellectual or cultural figure are quite disappointed.
In any case it is clear that for Updike Bech is just a sideshow, one of the many that constitute parts of the complex identity of this very remarkable American writer.

14 of 20 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Updike's best fiction, with one large caveat, January 1, 2002

By 

Eric Krupin (Salt Lake City, UT) - See all my reviews
(REAL NAME)   

This review is from: The Complete Henry Bech (Everyman's Library) (Hardcover)

I've always considered Updike much more valuable for his superlative book reviews than for his, to my mind, more-sizzle-than-steak fiction. (If you dig past the nostalgic plethora of period detail in the Rabbit books, there really isn't a great deal there.) But 20 years after accidentally discovering Henry Bech on the shelves of the public library (just as Updike has said he likes to imagine people encountering his books), his hapless exploits with women and the Muse continue to provide me with unfailing pleasure. It's a fine service to American literature to have them all - including the previously uncollected story "His Oeuvre", one of the best - gathered together between one set of hardcovers.

There is however, I'm sad to say, a big ugly boil on the butt of this otherwise handsome volume: the semi-infamous "Bech Noir", in which Updike, seemingly grown disgusted with the continuing durability of his character, jerks him through a sour ludicrous pantomime - the sheer awfulness of which makes it almost impossible to look at him the same way again. .... It's as if Frank L. Baum, around the fourth or fifth Oz book, had Dorothy move to Los Angeles where she became a crack whore. After that, the valedictory tale in which Bech most implausibly receives the Nobel Prize comes across as simply another gesture of contempt - whether towards the Swedish Academy, for honoring the even-less-qualified Toni Morrison rather than himself, or towards the reader, I can't say. All I can tell you - strange advice, I know - is to skip those two stories if you haven't been contaminated by them already.