Bech's Last Stand
John Updike likes to take chances, to roil the waters, to turn up the engines on his speeding yacht at a time when one might think he would be heading for the shore. At 66, he talks of winding down a career that has produced some of the most interesting fiction of the century. But he's still got a trick or two to entice an audience that never knows what to expect.
Bech At Bay (Knopf, $23) is Updike's third collection of stories about that almost-famous Jewish American novelist Henry Bech. Previous tales about the writer and his adventures in the literary boxing ring were published in Bech: A Book (1970) and Bech Is Back (1982). The long interval finds Bech entering his seventh decade dragging his feet and still concerned about his standing amongst his peers.
The new book contains some of the funniest writing Updike has ever done, with many laugh-out-loud moments scattered through one of the most delightful analyses of the state of American literature ever written.
In the first story, which concerns Bech's visit to Czechoslovakia, he defines the purpose of a writer, "which is to amuse himself, to indulge himself, to get his books into print with as little editorial smudging as he can, to slide through his society with minimal friction." That's as honest a definition as a vain author (are there any other kind?) might supply.
Writers hate competition, and Henry Bech "would not have minded if all other writers vanished, leaving him alone on a desert planet with a billion English-language readers." Bech is unhappy in these sparklingly hilarious stories, disappointed by advancing years, unhappy with long periods of writer's block, a failure in his unending attraction to the opposite sex. Updike writes of his protagonist, "He was a vain, limp leech on the leg of literature as it waded through swampy times." As Bech sees himself, "I'm seventy-four. . . I'm past my 'sell by' date."
In "Bech Presides," the author surprisingly finds himself enjoying the political power of being head of The Forty, a unique assembly of artists who have aged and exist only because inertia has prevented them from disassembling.
"Bech Pleads Guilty" describes the libel trial that ensues after Bech writes disparagingly of a Hollywood agent, whom Bech had called an "arch-gouger" who had "widened the prevailing tragic rift between the literary and cinematic arts." The story takes aim at today's Hollywood while showing Bech fretting over the indignities of being on trial.
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