Tag Archives: John Updike

Updike’s final two Henry Bech novels

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John Updike, Bech Is Back (1982); Bech at Bay (1998). Books 2 and 3 of The Complete Henry Bech, Everyman’s Library 264, hb, Alfred A. Knopf 2001, pp. 153-509

I posted recently on the first book in this trilogy of linked short stories by John Updike featuring the grumpily priapic Jewish author Henry Bech – an alter ego very different from everyman Rabbit Angstrom.

In my second post I indicated that I wasn’t sure whether to carry on with books 2 and 3, but was attracted by the flashes of brilliance that just about made up for the unsavoury elements, especially in the depiction of women as ‘dolls’ (as Bech ruefully reveals is what one critic said was a feature of his fiction). Ok, so it’s satiric, but also looks very like a convenient way of displaying a misogynistic, salacious attitude.

I persevered, but found the going increasingly unattractive. In Bech Is Back the middle-aged author is still blocked, struggling to finish his next novel: he has ‘all but ceased to write’, but his books ‘cast shuddering shadows toward the center of his life, where that thing called his reputation cowered.’

That convoluted, super-smart style pervades these stories (each Book consists of loosely linked short stories, originally published separately in periodicals like The New Yorker). It grates as often as it gratifies.

He marries, but is clearly not cut out for the suburban life that goes with it. He’s libidinous, but far from monogamous. That’s where Updike’s rather off-colour portrayal of Bech’s rampant sex life strays into what looks like male fantasy.

The stories in Bech at Bay were written a decade later, and they become increasingly bizarre and surreal – and for me, tedious. He continues to accept lucrative lecturing gigs abroad, and produces very little new literary work (though the novel he finally managed to finish in the previous Book has become a best-seller – bringing with its success some snide critical comments about his selling out).

This leads to his becoming ever more vindictive and vengeful towards those critics who have upset him with their negative reviews. This is where I really started to dislike what I was reading – but refused to give up.

It didn’t get any better, I’m afraid. There’s a silly story about Bech in court, defending himself against a libel charge. Another is an unedifying account of his going to Sweden to accept the Nobel Prize for literature (yes, his reputation had grown larger than his achievement). But his sexual promiscuity (usually accompanied by a refusal to commit emotionally) is tediously celebrated.

He redeems himself a little towards the end, but I’ll finish with the revealing final words of the novel, where Bech’s tortured self-doubt is tempered by hostility:

Those women who showed up at his readings did it, it seemed clear, to mock his books – clever, twisted, false books, empty of almost everything that mattered, these women he had slept with were saying. We, we are your masterpieces.

John Updike’s prose

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Some thoughts about John Updike’s style…

I recently posted on the first of American author John Updike (1932-2009)’s trilogy of novels about his fictitious, fractious Jewish author Henry Bech. I was uncertain whether to continue with the next one. Some aspects of the narrative jarred with me: Bech’s unreconstructed attitude towards women, his accompanying solipsism (often manifested in malicious sarcasm and spiky wordplay), and the mannered, verbose prose style with echoes of Nabokov and maybe Henry James. But there were also passages where the satire on the mid-20C American literary world, and the grumpy protagonist’s abrasive contacts with it and that of other countries, sparkled with brilliant wit and flair. An odd mix.

I decided to go on with book 2: Bech Is Back (1982). Once again it’s structured as a sequence of linked short stories, reflecting the publication of many of them originally as stand-alone pieces in The New Yorker. I haven’t finished it yet, and again I’m finding it frustratingly tacky in places, but there’s always something special about the novel that keeps me going on. Maybe I’m just not in tune with Updike’s tone and satiric purpose.

Before I post on the novel as a whole, I thought I’d discuss something about the prose style that I’ve brought up previously. The sentences are meticulously crafted; there’s often more going on beneath the level of the words that causes the reader to pause and reflect, ‘What else is going on here, apart from the surface meaning?’

Updike’s style is eclectic, featuring a heady range of registers, from patrician, poised and highbrow, with a dazzlingly broad vocabulary and syntactical virtuosity, to the harsh, direct and often vulgar language of the streets. I intend to illustrate this when I post on the novel as a whole.

It’s that vocabulary I wanted to highlight here. Updike keeps you on your linguistic toes (his stretching of language’s semantic limits is catching) much of the time, but here’s one word that I had to go and look up: ANFRACTUOUS. Here’s the passage it appears in; Bech is now married to his former mistress’s sister, Bea, both of whom we met in Bech: A Book, and living in the suburban town of Ossining in upstate New York, in the huge ‘mock-Tudor’ house where Bea lived with her first husband, describing his installation in this ‘mansion’ as being ‘like a hermit crab tossed into a birdhouse’. He feels uneasy immersed in this Wasp community with its complacent bourgeois domesticity (shades of Cheever here, too, perhaps – he lived there for the last two decades of his life) and whitewashed history (Ossining changed its earlier name of Sing Sing because of its associations with the infamous prison there). First a bit more context is needed, and an example of that supple, playful Updike style:

The folks downtown looked merry to Bech, and the whole burg like a play-set; he had the true New Yorker’s secret belief that people living anywhere else had to be, in some sense, kidding. On that sloping stage between Peekskill and Tarrytown he enjoyed being enrolled in the minor-city minstrelsy; he often volunteered to run Bea’s errands for household oddments [ofen in the drugstore] and marveling at the copious cosmetic aids of vain, anxious America. His light-headedness on these away-from-home afternoons strengthened him to burrow on, through that ANFRACTUOUS [my capitals] fantasy he was tracing among the lost towers of New York.

See what I mean? This is very much Updike’s cunning way of showing Bech’s sardonic reactions to this environment with its ‘sunstruck somnolence’ – Washington Irving’s fairytale country, the antithesis of edgy NYC. If he felt like a hermit crab in Bea’s mansion, here in downtown he’s like a mole, grubbing its way through thick, unyielding earth. And maybe there’s an anticlimactic allusion there to Fitzgerald’s famous last lines in The Great Gatsby, ‘so we beat on boats against the current borne back ceaselessly to the past’.

Back to ‘anfractuous’. Here’s the OED definition:

having many twists and turns; winding or sinous (first recorded in 15C)

From the 1920s it started to be used more figuratively to denote ‘humorous and ironic. Unruly, peevish’ – all resonances Updike surely intended to be felt.

At the level of the sentence, then, Updike rewards attentive reading. That extended theatrical metaphor collides with then reinforces what follows about Bech’s ‘fantasy’. I need to overcome my aversion to what can be seen as Updike’s flashiness and enjoy his craftsmanship and sleight of hand.

John Updike, Bech: A Book

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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.

Asides: Rabbit Angstrom’s incoherence in ‘Rabbit Redux’

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In my previous post I looked at a paragraph near the beginning of John Updike’s 1971 novel, Rabbit Redux. In this, the second in a sporadic series of ‘Asides’ (ie not conventional book reviews) I want to take a look at another paragraph closely in order to explore how Updike’s narrative voice functions with such artistic power.

I’m returning to the same early section of the novel from which yesterday’s extract was taken: Harry ‘Rabbit’ Angstrom’s marriage is faltering, his wife Janice has admitted to having an affair with a Greek car salesman called Charlie Stavros, so her insistence that they eat at a Greek restaurant in their home town of Brewer, Pennsylvania with their teenage son Nelson is another of the recurring knocks to his pride and self-esteem that Harry is assailed by throughout this quartet of novels.

In the restaurant Harry is determined to find something on the menu ‘enough like a hamburger’; his natural xenophobia is exacerbated by his incipient jealousy of Charlie. His unreflecting patriotism is one of several unendearing features of his character.

He touches the flowers in the vase on the red checked tablecloth: they’re real. ‘Janice was right. The place is nice.’ The free indirect style and present tense are trademark features of Updike’s technique; here, the words mirror Harry’s thoughts pretty exactly – monosyllabic, unsophisticated, indicative of his grudging approval.

There’s only one other couple dining:

Their faces have an edgy money look: their brows have that frontal clarity the shambling blurred poor can never duplicate. Though he can never now be one of them Harry likes their being here, in this restaurant so chaste it is chic. Maybe Brewer isn’t as dead on its feet as it seems. [p. 33, PMC edition]

The focalisation here is Harry’s, but the language shifts away from his untutored register into one more like the articulate, literate voice of Updike. ‘Edgy, money look’ is surely Harry (‘money’ for the standard ‘moneyed’ is his voice), but ‘frontal clarity’ is too abstract and polysyllabic to be in his lexicon, and the rest of that sentence is far too syntactically, aesthetically poised and complex for his limited range. ‘Chaste’ and ‘chic’ are way beyond Harry’s ken, but they illuminate for us the murky, muddled thoughts and impressions Harry is entertaining in a way he’d never be able to articulate with any such incisiveness or clarity.

Nevertheless these lines do reflect Harry’s grubby class envy and sense of inadequacy in the presence of people more wealthy or intelligent than he is (which is most people). Then the final sentence takes us right back into Harry’s sensibility: the clichéd ‘dead on its feet’ chimes with the rueful sentiment expressed: Harry feels he’s in a dead-end job (a linotype operator), in a dying marriage and a country that’s losing its way – situations with which he can personally identify.

In these few short lines, because of this subtly shifting narrative position, Updike is able both to show us Harry, as all the best writing courses recommend, as edgy and indecisive as his nickname implies, and as metaphysically challenged as the first syllable of his surname indicates. But Updike also provides an insight into Harry from this other, hovering perspective that he himself would be intellectually incapable of.

The narrator is rendering coherent what remains largely incoherent in Harry’s mediated thoughts. Updike doesn’t patronise Harry, however, in shifting the narrative voice about in this way. He is able to give us a perspective from which we can understand and sympathise with Harry’s habitual disappointment and bafflement as life conspires against him and his fundamental, flawed decency.

 

 

Asides: John Updike’s Rabbit

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When I started this blog just over three years ago I intended posting a fairly eclectic mix of pieces, literary and otherwise. As time has passed, I find it’s turning into, for the most part, a book reviewing site, with occasional forays into other areas.

I’d like to revert to that slightly more varied approach, and start posting different kinds of piece, either unconsidered trifles that I’ve squirreled away in notebooks over the years, and which when I revisit them strike me as interesting, or snippets I come across that caught my attention. Maybe just a short passage from a book I’ve enjoyed, but don’t necessarily want to review as a whole.

I realise some visitors to this site might not want to read such stuff, so I shall flag these pieces with the generic prefix ‘Asides’ in the title, so you can ignore them if you came here looking for book reviews.

My Penguin Modern Classics editions

My Penguin Modern Classics editions

So here’s a note about a passage in John Updike’s second novel in his Rabbit tetralogy, Rabbit Redux, first published in 1970, and which I read 5 years ago (an old notebook informs me). It picks up Harry ‘Rabbit’ Angstrom’s life ten years after the first in the sequence, Rabbit Run (he added each volume at roughly decade-long intervals).

In this book Harry is older, fatter, softer and has done with running. His marriage is faltering in the first volume, which ended with a domestic tragedy that stretched the marital situation to the limit; his wife Janice has now admitted she’s sleeping with a salesman at the Toyota franchise her father runs (Updike shows the zeitgeist brilliantly – here the looming demise of the American industrial-manufacturing machine; in the background are also the moon landings, civil rights, the Vietnam war) – a Greek man called Charlie Stavros. Harry is something of a bigot and a racist, so this doesn’t please him in several different ways.

He’s not an intellectual or a thinker, so when he does feel something, it tends to be visceral, conflicted. He’s not a particularly engaging protagonist, but there’s a humanity about him that’s rarely encountered in modern fiction in such a direct style, as I hope the following extract shows.

On his way to see a film he takes his teenage son to a Greek restaurant (Janice’s choice wasn’t too subtle). Here they’ve been discussing the film, ‘2001: A Space Odyssey’ – which Harry typically resents having to go to see [spoiler alert – plot revealed]:

Harry likes the sensation of frightening her, of offering to confront outright this faceless unknown he feels now in their lives, among them like a fourth member of the family. The baby that died? But though Janice’s grief was worse at first, though she bent under it like a reed he was afraid might break, in the long years since, he has become sole heir to the grief. Since he refused to get her pregnant again the murder and guilt have become all his. At first he tried to explain how it was, that sex with her had become too dark, too serious, too kindred to death, to trust anything that might come out of it. Then he stopped explaining and she seemed to forget: like a cat who sniffs around in corners mewing for the drowned kittens a day or two and then back to lapping milk and napping in the wash basket. Women and Nature forget. Just thinking of the baby, remembering how he had been told of her death over a pay phone in a drugstore, puts a kink in is chest, a kink he still associates, dimly, with God. [pp. 31-32, PMC edition]

Updike’s handling of the present tense and complex syntax seems effortless. And he risks taking on the biggest of themes: sex, death, gender, Nature – and God.

The technique is similar to the free indirect thought that has been a feature of prose fiction since Jane Austen: these words are largely focalised through Harry’s consciousness. But it’s more subtle than that. The extended cat simile has the naked nastiness that we’ve come to identify as Harry’s default response to anything upsetting. It’s misogynistic (reinforced by that brutally short, simple sentence about ‘women and Nature’ later) and cruel – but it rings true. Updike doesn’t take the easy option of making Harry ‘relatable’, as my teenage students would say.

He has the courage to make him all too human, as flawed as the next person. He’s consumed with self-pity, inarticulate rage, and an existential-spiritual bleakness that matches some of the bleakest moments in Beckett. Yet there’s a warmth and humour lurking near the surface all the time which somehow redeems these damaged, hurting people. They’re banal, baffled and transcendent in their abrasive contact with the exigencies of life. Harry is no everyman, but he’s not far off.

Next time I hope to look at another passage from this book.

Hope this diversion has been OK with readers. I’d be delighted to hear feedback in the comments – positive or not.