Bech Is Back. This item is unavailable.Bech Is Back

Seven new installments in the peripatetic life of the Jewish-American writer, Henry Bech, catch him in several aesthetic embarrassments as he travels to several third-world countries, turns fifty, marries, falls in love, and writes a best-selling book

"Bech is back all right, but only after paying a large and painful price. . . . Updike reflects in these pages on the odd and unsettling ways in which art can impinge upon life, the ways in which a book acquires a life of its own that seems wholly unrelated to that of the person who created it, the ways in which celebrity separates those upon whom it is bestowed from reality."--The Washington Post

"Mr. Updike finds full scope for his gifts here: for sly and cheerfully malicious pensées on contemporary literary life; for busy observations on human behavior."--The New Yorker

"[Updike] at the top of his craft."--Time