Review of John Updike’s Bech: A Book
Just finished reading John Updike’s collection of short stories (which might as well be a novel) Bech: A Book, which came out in 1970. It was very good and could be classified in that subsection of Updike’s writing which is specifically about writers, celebrities, and the celebrated writing life. Henry Bech is a moderately successful novelist and short story writer who, when we meet him, is taking a tour behind the Iron Curtain at the behest of the State Department, to foster relations between the two Cold War powers. He goes from Russia to Romania to Bulgaria, meeting local writers hemmed in by secret police and party lines. He is handled by American minor diplomats and unattainable woman translators. Bech is, like virtually all Updike creations, always eyeing the ladies and looking for a small pathway through which to squirrel his fantasy, or more.
This from the introduction, in Bech’s voice, speaking as if to Updike (more than a hint of Nabokov, the creation addressing the creator):
Until your short yet still not unlongish collection, no revolutionary has concerned himself with our oppression, with the silken mechanism by which America reduces her writers to imbecility and cozenage. Envied like Negroes, disbelieved in like angels, we veer between the harlotry of the lecture platform and the torture of the writing desk, only to collapse, our five-and-dime Halloween priests’ robes a-rustle with economy-class jet-set tickets and honorary certificates from the Cunt-of-the-Month Club, amid a standing crowd of rueful, Lilliputian obituaries. Our language degenerating in the mouths of broadcasters and pop yellers, our formal designs crumbling like sand castles under the feet of beach bullies, we nevertheless and incredibly support with our desperate efforts … a flourishing culture of publishers, agents, editors, tutors, Timeniks, media personnel in all shades of suavity, chic, and sexual gusto. When I think of the matings, the moaning, jubilant fornications between ectomorphic oversexed junior editors and svelte hot-from-Wellesley majored-in-English-minored-in-philosophy female coffee-fetchers and receptionists that have been engineered with the lever of some of my poor scratched-up and pasted-over pages (they arrive in the editorial offices as stiff with Elmer’s glue as a masturbator’s bedsheet; the office boys use them for tea-trays), I could mutilate myself like sainted Origen, I could keen like Jeremiah. Thank Jahweh these bordellos in the sky can soon dispense with the excuse of us entirely; already the contents of a book count as little as the contents of a breakfast cereal box. It is all a matter of the premium, and the shelf site, and the amount of air between the corn flakes.
Updike’s Bech is supposed to be an amalgam of Jewish writers like Mailer, Bellow, Henry Roth, and Malamud. The targeting of Philip Roth is not explicitly put in the crosshairs but the shot must have been taken. He apparently got in some hot water with Cynthia Ozick for his treatment of Jewish writers (haven’t read that yet). He went on to write Bech stories, enough to fill two more collections about the characters, which I have acquired from used bookstores with the purity of in-person purchases, not over the Internet, and which I look forward to reading like newly uncovered tablets from an archaeological site. The short story collection that is actually linked to be something resembling a novel is an intriguing form. Something about it speaks of the ease and relaxation of the writer; the strain of composition seems to have vanished, neither stories nor a novel was pursued in a hurry. This might make the reader relax, too. The character returned again and again like a friend you stumble upon in a city without planning it. This is the impression I get from Updike, at least.
Updike is one of the most polished writers I have encountered. Some might say the polish is annoying and removed, again the Nabokovian chill. I don’t think so. I can’t read Updike’s stories about marital discord and divorce, the suburban middle-class man being the inheritor (not victim) of cosmic weather patterns, and not feel warmth and recognition. Here in the Bech stories he has projected that sensitivity out to somebody more like himself: a writer living in the world. Updike wrote scads of books on nonfiction about writers but not so often aimed that lens at a fictional creation reflecting the writer’s worries, humor, stumblings, lustful adventures, and insights. To my fellow writers I recommend reading Updike in toto of course, but in particular his Henry Bech stories for what they have to say about being a writer.