Bech at Bay: A Quasi-Novel - Hardcover

Updike, John

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 0241140277 ISBN 13: 9780241140277

Publisher: Hamish Hamilton Ltd., London, 1999

Synopsis

Bech is back - in the third of Updike's novels about the peripatetic Jewish-American author forever embattled by his literary peers, critics, and not a few women. Sharp, hilarious satire with an elegiac strand, in which Updike sets his peerless sights on the state of literature at the century's close

About this title

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 honoured, 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, Amazon.com

Review:

"Bech at Bay is brilliant."
--The New York Review of Books
"NEARLY EVERY PAGE OF THIS BOOK SPARKLES WITH LITTLE GEMS."
--San Francisco Sunday Examiner & Chronicle
"WICKEDLY FUNNY . . . A JOY TO READ . . . In his extraordinarily productive career, John Updike has given us a multitude of memorable characters, but none more lovable than the high-minded, mild-mannered, rather hapless writer Henry Bech. . . . Updike writes so well--with such intelligence, such precision, such grace--one is exhilarated by the sheer sentence-by-sentence beauty of the prose."
--Chicago Tribune
"A WONDERFUL NOVEL, EVIL AND FUNNY, A BIG CITY BURLESQUE BRISTLING WITH THE ARTIFACTS OF MODERN URBAN CULTURE."
--Detroit Free Press
"IF YOU'RE ANYTHING LITERARY--WRITER, PUBLISHER, EVEN CRITIC-- YOU'LL LOVE IT. AND IF YOU'RE NOT, YOU'LL LOVE IT TOO. . . . Bech at Bay is about getting old, about life and literature passing Bech by, about the
end of a simpler, better age--and ev

"Wickedly funny . . . a joy to read . . . John Updike has given us a multitude of memorable characters, but none more lovable than the high-minded, mild-mannered, rather hapless writer Henry Bech.""--Chicago Tribune"
"Witty, acute, and surprisingly affecting . . . Updike at his most interesting and engaging . . . Like the other books about Henry Bech, this is modest in size but generous with its rewards."--"The Washington Post Book World"
""Bech at Bay" is brilliant.""--The New York Review of Books"

About this edition

• Publisher: Hamish Hamilton Ltd., London
• Publication date: 1999
• ISBN 10: 0241140277
• ISBN 13: 9780241140277
• Binding: Hardcover
• Edition number: 1
• Number of pages: 241