John Updike, Bech: A Book. Pt 1 of The Complete Henry Bech: Twenty Stories. Everyman’s Library 264 hb, Alfred A. Knopf, 2001; pp. 1-152 of 509.

This novel is very different in subject and style from Updike’s (1932-2009) four Rabbit novels, which I devoured some years ago. As with that tetralogy, he added a new Bech novel (three of them) at roughly ten-year intervals.

Unlike Harry (Rabbit) Angstrom, a WASP like Updike, a working-class everyman who would no doubt be a Trump/MAGA supporter today, Henry Bech is Jewish (but with anti-Semitic tendencies), cerebral and educated, and author of several novels that had been published to varying degrees of acclaim. He’s considered, in Bech: A Book, where he’s middle-aged, a celebrity.

But he’s blocked (though he jokes that he’s just a ‘slow typist’). He has ideas for a new novel, but can’t bring it to life. So he takes on various government-sponsored cultural/lecturing visits to Eastern Europe, Soviet Russia and S. America. There he talks on highbrow topics to do with modern American literature (though his favourite authors include Melville and Hawthorne):

His reputation had grown while his powers declined.

Like Rabbit, he’s angst-ridden and lost, ‘displaced’. Here’s a revealing passage, quoted satirically by Updike from an article by a fictitious British journalist (who’d claimed to be an ardent fan), where the writer comments on Bech’s ‘oeuvre’:

…Queried concerning the flowery, not to say fruity, style of The Chosen [Bech’s third and most recent novel, published in 1963, seven years earlier].

With self-referential wit, Updike writes this novel in a similarly baroque, ‘fruity’ style, with arresting turns of phrase, puns and epigrams. Take this extract, where Bech is about to deliver one of his lectures to students at a girls’ school in ‘rural Virginia’. His habitual existential angst kicks in as he contemplates the expectant young audience:

…those seriously sparkling eyes, those earnestly flushed cheeks, those demurely displayed calves and knees – appalled him with the abyss of their innocence…The essence of matter, he saw, is dread. Death hangs behind everything.

He goes on:

He saw himself, in this nest of delicate limbs, limbs still ripening toward the wicked seductiveness Nature intended, as a seed among too many eggs, a gross thrilling intruder, a genuine male intellectual Jew…[and so on for five more lines].

Women are often depicted in this novel, from Bech’s lubricious perspective, in this ‘male gaze’ kind of way: they tend to be seen in terms of how sexually attractive he finds them. If this is meant satirically, it still strikes an unsavoury note for me, and I struggled at times to carry on reading. Admittedly, Updike has chosen a flawed character whose attitudes and behaviour (especially towards women), like Rabbit’s, aren’t always admirable – but these factors, along with the tortuous, self-consciously literary style, make for a troubling, only intermittently satisfying read.

What kept me going was the appearance every now and then of an image, a sentence or passage of breathtaking elegance, wit and technical brilliance: these more than made up for the otherwise laboured Jamesian complexity and tone that came across to me as borderline smug. Here’s one passage I marked as pleasing – not his best, but fairly typical; Bech is an a lecturing trip to Bulgaria:

There was a mosque, and an assortment of trolley cars salvaged from the remotest corner of Bech’s childhood, and a tree that talked – that is, it was so full of birds that it swayed under their weight and emitted volumes of chirping sound like a great leafy loudspeaker.

Ten years ago I quoted from and analysed two passages from Rabbit Redux (1971) HERE and HERE.