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Updike, John Bech at Bay: 3 ISBN 13: 9780449004043

Bech at Bay: 3 - Softcover

 
9780449004043: Bech at Bay: 3
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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.

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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:
"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

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  • PublisherRandom House Trade
  • Publication date1999
  • ISBN 10 044900404X
  • ISBN 13 9780449004043
  • BindingPaperback
  • Number of pages256
  • Rating

Other Popular Editions of the Same Title

9780375403682: Bech at Bay

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ISBN 10:  ISBN 13:  9780375403682
Publisher: Bantam Doubleday Dell Publishing..., 1998
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  • 9780140278279: Bech at Bay: A Quasi-Novel

    Penguin, 1999
    Softcover

  • 9780375704178: Bech at Bay (Random House Large Print)

    Random..., 1998
    Softcover

  • 9780241140277: Bech at Bay: A Quasi-Novel

    Hamish..., 1999
    Hardcover

  • 9780965063708: BECH AT BAY.

    KNOPF., 1998
    Softcover

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