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Overview
In this, the final volume in John Updike’s mock-heroic trilogy about the Jewish American writer Henry Bech, our hero is older but scarcely wiser. Now in his seventies, he remains competitive, lecherous, and self-absorbed, lost in a brave new literary world where his books are hyped by Swiss-owned conglomerates, showcased in chain stores attached to espresso bars, and returned to warehouses three weeks after publication. In five chapters more startling and surreal than any that have come before, Bech presides over the American literary scene, enacts bloody revenge on his critics, and wins the world’s most coveted writing prize. It’s not easy being Henry Bech in the post-Gutenbergian world, but somebody has to do it, and he brings to the task his signature mixture of grit, spit, and ennui.Synopsis
Henry Bech, the moderately well known Jewish-American writer who served as the hero of John Updike's previous Bech: A Book (1970) and Bech Is Back (1982), has become older but scarcely wiser. In these five new chapters from his life, he is still at bay, pursued by the hounds of desire and anxiety, of unbridled criticism and publicity in a literary world ever more cheerfully crass. He fights intimations of annihilation in still-Communist Czechoslovakia, while promiscuously consorting with dissidents, apparatchiks, and Midwestern Republicans. Next, he succumbs to the temptations of power by accepting the presidency of a quaint and cosseted honorary body patterned on the Académie Française. Then, the reader finds him on trial in California and on a criminal rampage in a gothic Gotham, abetted by a nubile sidekick called Robin. Lastly, our septuagenarian veteran of the literary wars is rewarded with a coveted medal, stunning him into a well-deserved silence. It's not easy being Henry Bech in the post-Gutenbergian world, but somebody has to do it, and he brings to the task an indomitable mixture of grit and ennui.
Atlantic Monthly - Phoebe-Lou Adams
. . .[T]his book is a fine send-up of the literary life — witty, malicious, and fun to read.
Editorials
Caroline Angier
If you're anything literary — writerpublishereven critic — you'll love it. And if you're notyou'll love it too. . .Everything Bech-Updike has to say about the writing life is awfulhilarious and true. —The Wall Street JournalDavid Lehman
. . .[A] comic delight, especially deft in its satirical treatment of New York intellectual warfare.—People Magazine
David Lodge
So here it is: Bech at Bay is brilliant. -- New York Review of BooksJames Shapiro
The best moments in the five stories in this 'quasi novel' are ones in which Updike chooses not to hold back.—New York Times Book Review
Malcolm Bradbury
Writers in particular will love this book, with its cunning observation, its acid cultural portraits of the New York and Californian literary scene, its touches of parody and self-parody, its characters à clef, its sense of the value and the nastiness of literature, its frankness about literary ires and envies. Updike indulges himself with Bech, and lets loose a bitter comic vigour....Other readers will like it too. It's Updike at his most left-handed. But that is still pleasure indeed. -- Literary ReviewMichiko Kakutani
. . .Mr. Updike has lost some of his enthusiasm for his old creation, and his weariness frequently shows. . . .Bech at Bay . . .intermittently sparkles. ..[but] it's a highly uneven collection of stories. . . .this volume must surely count as one of [Updike's] more minor, if entertaining, productions.—New York Times
Phoebe-Lou Adams
. . .[T]his book is a fine send-up of the literary life — witty, malicious, and fun to read.—Atlantic Monthly
Richard Brookhiser
When he has other things besides his swing to worry about, Updike sails his ball to the green.— National Review
Walter Kirn
There's less rage than it seems behind Updike's satire. . . .Time has passed his character by, but Updike seems bound and determined to say in step. His latest Bech book,however, catches him resting. —New York MagazinePublishers Weekly -
At this juncture of his life, 'semi-obscure' 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, John 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.
Library Journal
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 prize.Library Journal
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 prize.Booknews
Continuation of the chronicles of the protagonist of two of Updike's popular previous works, the "moderately well known Jewish-American writer," Henry Bech. The five stories herein follow Bech through Prague, France, Sweden, California, and New York, as a fictional counterpart through which Updike comments on the foibles--literary, academic, and cultural--of his, and our, times. Annotation c. by Book News, Inc., Portland, Or.Alex Beam
I suspect you'll find it irresistible. -- The Boston GlobeCaroline Angier
If you're anything literary -- writer, publisher, even critic -- you'll love it. And if you're not, you'll love it too. . .Everything Bech-Updike has to say about the writing life is awful, hilarious and true. -- The Wall Street JournalDavid Bowman
October 1998Bech Redux: I'm going to kill a woman I've never met. Kill her in cold blood.
Don't get me wrong -- I'm no stalker. Just an humble novelist. But if I do carry out my terrible intentions, John Updike will be to blame -- and all because of his new book, Bech at Bay. This latest installment of the literary adventures of the "moderately well known Jewish-American writer" Henry Bech is subtitled A Quasi-Novel." Ha! Just how "quasi" is it, Mr. Updike?
In the chapter titled "Bech in Czech," Bech has a sexual adventure involving a visit to Kafka's grave. "Bech Presides" finds the writer chairing an elite Manhattan literary committee, a scenario that provides numerous opportunities for Updike to indulge in gleefully outrageous literary rants: "Yes, women!" a character cries. "There are so many these days! Wise women! Elaine Pagels! Ellen Zwilich! Eudora Welty! We no longer need to swim on [men's] backs, turning our foolish broken hearts into song, that was what we did in my day." Reminiscent of the O. J. Simpson and Heidi Fleiss trials, in "Bech Pleads Guilty," Bech has his own experience in a Los Angeles courtroom. Then, in "Bech and the Bounty of Sweden," Bech actually receives the Nobel Prize for literature, prompting The New York Times to report, "The Swedish Academy's penchant for colorful nonentities and anti-establishment gadflies as recipients of its dynamite-based bounty has surpassed mere caprice and taken on, in this latest selection, dimensions of wantonness."
I have to tell you that I loved Bech's new adventures. But I live in New York and work in publishing. Will you enjoy Bech as well? Yup. Updike's calm wit is ever evident in these latest episodes. They have appeal far beyond the pearly gates of Knopf.
"So, Bowman," you say. "What about this dame you're gonna off? What's Updike have to do with it?"
There is a chapter in Bech at Bay I haven't mentioned yet, "Bech Noir." This is the chapter that is going to make a murderer out of me. It's nominally about book reviewers. I used to review books for one of the most prestigious literary commentaries in America. Then a new editor took over and the guy thought I was too weird. Can you imagine? He even gave an interview in which he said novelists like me were terrible book reviewers because we use kid gloves in the critical ring, whereas professional book critics never pull their punches. I decided to write a rebuttal -- novelists make damn good book reviewers. To buttress this claim, I interviewed the foremost novelist and book reviewer in the country, John Updike.
"I think I began reviewing around 1960," he told me. "It's getting on to 40 years I've been doing it." He then praised the literary reviews of another novelist, Henry James. "I find him invaluable, really, a wonderful critic with the voice of a man who's been there. He can see another person's novel from the inside, which I suppose is an advantage a novelist might bring to reviewing a novel."
Updike doesn't recommend book reviewing for everyone: "In a sense it clutters your desk with books that you would otherwise not read, and takes energy from truly pleasurable reading that you might otherwise do."
I then asked how he wrote reviews. (A general question, I know -- but I made it sound sophisticated.) "I tend to try to give the sort of review I would like to get," he told me. "Even if the review is not enthusiastic, it should show some signs of understanding what the author tried to do."
He then went on to say that the two novelists he has always reviewed are Saul Bellow and Philip Roth. "I have given A plus to every book of theirs that I have reviewed," he said. What about other writers' books that turn out to be duds? "A person who thinks of himself as a creative artist does not write the kind of review that a professional critic, including The New York Times's Michiko Kakutani, does -- ready to weed the garden, pull up and cast away those unworthy of life and growth. You don't give that kind of alienating reviews to other novelists because it might be your turn next."
He sighed. "I could cite early reviews of mine that were harsh and unfriendly. Very early in my career I reviewed Franny and Zooey not very favorably on the front page of The New York Times Book Review."
Ha! So it was John Updike who turned J. D. Salinger into a literary recluse! I didn't say this, of course. Instead I asked if literary revenge was real -- that is, if novelist A gives novelist B's book a bad review, when A's next book is published, it will be reviewed by one of B's friends and panned. "I think that fear is real. The laws of war probably function in the literary world as in any other."
Four months after that interview, I read "Bech Noir" and discovered that the reasonable, gentlemanly writer I had spoken to has a decidedly darker side. In "Bech Noir," Updike's alter ego kills the book reviewers who gave him bad reviews. One reviewer is sent to the big sleep Agatha Christie-style, with poison on an envelope flap. (That may sound far-fetched, but novelist and former CIA agent Charles McCarry tells me that spies do this all the time.) Bech doesn't stop with just one critic. He goes after more. And the murders get nastier. "I'm going to shut you up," Bech tells his last victim. "I am going to squeeze this f****** trigger and rub you out. Don't think I'm too squeamish. I've killed before."
Now, I don't just review books. I write them. And as I savored each act of Bech's murderous vengeance, I considered a particularly nasty book reviewer who has been much on my mind this past year. She reviews books for a prestigious publication, though, of course, she's never written a book herself. I happen to know that this woman is cheap to waiters and cabbies. She kicks dogs. She votes for the politicians you and I despise. She is also the only critic in America who didn't like my last novel, proclaiming it too "nihilistic," because it concerned a group of armed nannies who shoot babynappers. She has obviously never heard of Dashiell Hammett or Sergio Leone. Women with guns are not nihilistic, they're hard-boiled.
Can you imagine the hellish joy I would feel watching that reviewer's little pink tongue lick an envelope flap laced with arsenic? Or how gleefully I'd bash the back of her head with a box of James M. Cain novels? (Before the blow I'd whisper, "I'm not being nihilistic...just hard-boiled." Then, thunk!)
Why am I confessing this to you? Because we all have our uncomprehending critics, that numskull who turns in the bad review or the substandard job report. But if, after reading Bech at Bay, you too are inspired to silence those nagging, critical voices, just remember: Don't do the crime if you can't do the time. On the other hand, Updike has written 48 books. You can get a lot of reading done in stir (not to mention the nifty tattoos).
As for John Updike: Anyone who has ever given him a bad review better be on the lookout. He yacks like a gent, but he's got a Clint Eastwood heart.
David Bowman is the author of Let the Dog Drive and Bunny Modern.