The Complete Henry Bech (Penguin Modern Classics) by John Updike

Bech

by John Updike

From his birth in 1923 to his belated paternity and public apotheosis as a spry septuagenarian in 1999, Bech plugs away, globetrotting in the company of foreign dignitaries one day and schlepping in tattered tweeds on the college lecture circuit the next. By turns cynical and na�ve, wry and avuncular, and always amorous, he is Updike's most endearing confection-a Lothario, a curmudgeon, and a winsome literary icon all in one. A perfect forum for Updike's limber prose, The Complete Henry Bech is an arch portrait of the literary life in America from an incomparable American writer.Since tales of his exploits began appearing in The New Yorker more than thirty years ago, Henry Bech, John Updike's playfully irreverent alter-ego, has charmed readers with his aesthetic dithering and his seemingly inexhaustible libido.

Genres: Fiction, Short Stories, American, Classics, Literature, Literary Fiction, Novels

Paperback

First published January 28, 1993

About the author

John Hoyer Updike was an American writer. Updike's most famous work is his Rabbit series (Rabbit, Run; Rabbit Redux; Rabbit Is Rich; Rabbit At Rest; and Rabbit Remembered). Rabbit is Rich and Rabbit at Rest both won Pulitzer Prizes for Updike. Describing his subject as "the American small town, Protestant middle class," Updike is well known for his careful craftsmanship and prolific writing, having published 22 novels and more than a dozen short story collections as well as poetry, literary criticism and children's books. Hundreds of his stories, reviews, and poems have appeared in The New Yorker since the 1950s. His works often explore sex, faith, and death, and their inter-relationships.

He died of lung cancer at age 76.

Reviews

[Charles · Rating 5 out of 5]

Reading other reviews on this site and coming to the book only after going through the entire Rabbit series, I had expected to be disappointed by Bech. Turns out, I wasn’t. In fact, I was treated to agile, able, intelligent prose once more, and I relished every page of Henry’s ridiculous adventures. There’s something so vital in John Updike, such brains at the wheel, such good-natured humor; he's a bit of a gentleman and a bit of its opposite, and I love how they combine.

Besides, that cliché according to which stories centered on writers make for bad novels? This book begs to differ. The various awards, the networking cocktail events, the small-scale diplomatic hurdles during international travels: there are a number of first-class social observations delivered with flair in this collection.

A long read – I took my sweet time – but a satisfying one, if you were hesitating.

[John · Rating 5 out of 5]

Updike's passing this morning left me looking at my bookshelves. The man gave good weight, as the butchers say; he sustained his enthusiasm & never embarrassed himself. There are a couple-three touchstone essays among his best, meditations on why psychological realism still matters, & you can't knock that cluttered '70s scrapbook RABBIT IS RICH. But these Bech stories are the ones that stick between my vertebrae. They compose an all-too-real fantasia of a career lost in the funhouse of American Empire literary experience, all the more impressive because the central figure is so unlike his creator. Bech is Jewish & a naturalborn New Yorker, by nature unfit for marriage & children, plus an inveterate Slow Joe at getting the writing done. All a galaxy far away from the prolix, WASPy, suburban, ultra-domestic Updike -- yet in that cracked mirror there wink some of the brightest shards of what matters, for any maker of words & stories. I mean that as Bech gets stoned out of his gourd, one night in the '60s between the girl he's shagging & the one he'd rather, what comes to his mind is, of all things, a climactic sentence from Joyce's ULYSSES, intimidating for verbal beauty, a sentence Bech knows remains beyond his powers. Such yearning, such faith in the calling, keeps poking up oddly through the dung -- itself rendered, to be sure, w/ ready wit & squinting precision. In one of the best stories, Bech lands a lucrative visiting gig at a posh girls' school, & he understands swiftly that a good-looking young teacher is his for the plucking -- yet he astonishes himself by falling into weeping prayer in a grove of trees, terrified at the vacuity of what he's got. In a later story B. & his B-girl (considerably less than half his age) begin to murder his worst critics, themselves long in the tooth by now of course, & yet even this nutty noir provides bittersweet embodiment of ultimate justice, & of the vanity that is is worldly accomplishment. Updike said in interview that he came to this vein in his sensibility accidentally, after he dreamed up & sold the first Bech story, but it was the accident of his life. This Trickster doppelganger kept some part of him real, when the flimsy veils of success gave way.

[Jay French · Rating 4 out of 5]

Great combination of the three Bech books, a fine introduction, and a closing story, "His Oeuvre". Read together, you see the growth in Bech, from his foreign country tours of the famous American non-prolific author, through his personal life and marriages, and on to the culmination of his career, a thoroughly undeserved Nobel Prize. The stories ended with a surprising arc. I found the closing story to be an reminder of the best parts of Bech, occasionally grasping for excellence and occasionally reaching it, but for just a moment. Then just memories remain. The excellence I mention here is of course sex, as Bech is that kind of fellow.

[Ema · Rating 4 out of 5]

I think Henry is Updike himself.

[L.G. Cullens · Rating 3 out of 5]

I picked this up years ago on a recommendation to help my writing skills. It helped some, but I wasn't impressed by the stories.

[John · Rating 4 out of 5]

John Updike: ethics and aesthetics of adultery
This review looks at the following novels by John Updike: Marry Me, The Poorhouse Fair, The Centaur, The Complete Bech, The Maples Stories, Brazil, A Month of Sundays, In the Beauty of the Lilies, Seek My Face and a few of the essays in the collections Hugging the Shore and Odd Jobs.
John Updike’s fiction is noted for its exploration of adulterous, though conventional, heterosexual relationships. Along with those other literary ‘titans’ and male-point-of-view novelists, Philip Roth and Saul Bellow, he dominated mid-late 20th century American literature. It is only relatively recently that all of these writers’ varying degrees of misogyny or chauvinism has been called to account, although all three are still read and much of the how or the style of what they wrote is still intriguing. In the case of Updike his Flaubertian dedication to the craft of writing is still honoured, and maybe also there is something Flaubertian in his elaboration of adultery as a literary theme.
The first thing that strikes the reader of some of the early novels dealing with this theme, like The Centaur or Marry Me, is that Updike is very far from pursuing any kind of romantic treatment of adultery. Even in the later somewhat romantic novel Brazil, which teasingly reinterprets the classic romantic myth of Tristram and Isolde in its two young lovers Tristao and Isabel, we find they are fitfully unfaithful (and, at the end, are separated by death.) Updike’s anti-romanticism directs his criticism of other writers like Hemingway:
Hemingway’s heroes make love without baring their bottoms, and the women as well as the men are falsified by a romantic severity, and exemption from odours and awkwardness that [Edmund] Wilson, with the dogged selfless honesty of a bookworm, presses his own nose, and ours, into such solemn satisfaction. Hugging the Shore 1984: 198
In associating himself with Edmund Wilson’s approach to sex (in his novel Hecate Country), Updike is declaring himself by inclination anti-romantic. Truth to human life when exploring extra-marital sex is, for Updike, to be truthful to underlining the primary role of carnal instinctiveness in it. Adultery, betrayal, and the pursuit of sexual ecstasy are what Updike calls ‘that true life, the life of ecstasy and the spirits’ (Brazil 54).
So the romantic is displaced by amour in Updike’s adulterous world, a world in which we experience a detailed, refined, literary erotic of fleshed, naked, cheating bodies. But ‘the spirits’ referred to at the end of this quote from Brazil indicates, also, that for Updike the pursuit of sexual ecstasy provokes in his characters spiritual reflections on guilt and questions of right and wrong. Sexual passion brings in its wake knowledgeability -much like Adam and Eve discovering an awareness of sin and shame at their nakedness.
There is an aesthetic underpinning of this as well, seen across Updike’s novels, in which the stimulation of the flesh by desire, the material basis of human sexuality, provokes considerations of form, of representation. In his essays on Vargas Llosa and Saul Bellow Updike underlines how the two writers whilst writing about sex over-stress the materiality of the body - the spiritless fleshliness of flesh. Llosa’s In Praise of the Stepmother’s exploring its sexual theme to rigorous, materialist extremes, brings the reader up against the possible limits of his or her own commitment to sensuality. (Odd Jobs: 723). Similarly, in regard to Bellow’s Dean’s December Updike writes:
And what Bellow does with human bodies! Visually seizing upon lumps of fat and hollows of bone and ridges of gristle no one has ever put into words before, he makes of each body a kind of physical myth, a flesh-and-blood ideogram. (Hugging the Shore 260)
In contrast, the aesthetic and ethical are simultaneous dimensions of sexual desire in Updike’s adultery novels. This is seen in, for example, Seek My Face where the elderly famous artist Hope Chafetz (associated with a Jackson Pollock-like figure) becomes excited by the body of her young interviewer. She finds herself particularly fascinated by the septum of the young woman’s nose in which she ‘glimpses’ the ‘live creatureliness [that] brings the girl’s other features up into a feral glory’ (188). In The Poorhouse Fair Updike again focuses on the septum, this time of the dead flesh of the lying-in-state patriarchal figure of Mendelssohn:
Perfectly preserved his blind lids stretch above the crumbled smile. The skin that life has fled is calm as marble. Can we believe, who have seen his vital nostrils flare expressively, revealing in lifting the flaming septum, the secret wall red with pride within, that there is no resurrection? That bright bit of flesh; where would such a thing have gone? (The Poorhouse Fair 155)
There is much direct discussion about right and wrong, about religion and doubt(ers) in Updike’s novels. The advice that Dreaver, the Presbyterian moderator in In the Beauty of the Lilies, gives to the doubt-ridden minister Clarence is that The soul needs something extra, a place outside of matter where it can stand (79). But Updike does not mean by this some type of Platonic spirit realm but rather an accepting of the body as a means to, or an element in, the experience of ensoulment. So, early in this novel Updike describes how Clarence’s doubts coincide with a loss of a proportionate sense of things:
Without Biblical blessing the physical universe became sheerly horrible and disgusting. All fleshly acts became vile, rather than merely some. The reality of men slaying lambs and cattle, fish and fowl to sustain their own bodies took on an aspect of grisly comedy – the blood-soaked selfishness of a cosmic mayhem. (7)
Clarence is a sympathetic figure because in Updike’s view a loss of faith leads to questioning and reflection on petrifying morals, and when it’s stimulated by passion so much the better. This is clearly, almost baldly, stated in the more lightly Doubting Thomas figure of Masefield, a lusty priest (having parallels with Greene’s similarly ethically ambiguous ‘whiskey priests’) in A Month of Sundays.
Ethicality is not, then, found abstractly outside of materiality, of the flesh, of ecstasy or the mundane. This is personified in The Poorhouse Fair, by the contrasting figures of Hook, the irascible elderly incumbent of the old people’s home, and Connor, the Prefect/administrator who takes over the reins after Mendelssohn. Connor is shown to be a humanist and prone to making mistakes – he is a very human figure (much like the self-deprecating George Caldwell in The Centaur). Sceptical, Connor likens the abstract idea of God to ‘a hollow noun’ (99), he is a religion-doubting figure in contrast to the religious and strongly opinionated, censorious Hook. Hook’s complaining and rebelliousness against the post-Mendelsohn order at the home incites the other residents to ‘stone’ Connor at the fair. But through this experience of pain and ridicule Connor is shown attaining spiritual knowledge:
The shock of the incident this afternoon had ebbed enough for him to dare open the door which he had slammed on the fresh memory. A monster of embarrassment, all membrane, sprang out and embraced him. The emotion clung to him in disgusting glutinous webs, as if he were being born and fully conscious. (135)
But, for Hook, in contrast, ‘Providence strikes. Virtue is a solid thing, as firm and workable as wood’ – he is a character of habit who cannot reflect and therefore cannot change. (98)
When Updike’s Couples was published he became associated with the permissive ‘swinging’ Sixties. But his novels of adultery are not peopled by randy, wife-swopping, thoughtless ‘swingers’. In the novel Marry Me (ironically, I think, subtitled ‘A Romance’) Updike explores how adultery and unfaithfulness, makes Jerry and Sally extremely conscious of right and wrong – they are continually making choices about whether or not to continue their affair. At one point in the novel Updike keenly compares their position of fevered moral questioning to ‘the only place where there is no choice is in paradise’ (167). Updike consciously distanced himself from the commodified, tread-mill of Sixties sexual liberation, seen in his essay on Vargas Llosa:
Without a surrounding society to defy, adulterous passion often wilts, and a daring elopement sinks into ranch-house funk of socially approved marriage. Sixties-style sexuality, with its hot tubs and bustling crash pads, was on to something; promiscuity, at least until it turns into a quasi-religious, obligatory form of exercise, suits our interior multiplicity. (Odd Jobs 725)
Against mindless sex Updike also makes a more elaborate claim that there is to be found a kind of resurrectionary force derived in the always risky ‘commitment’ to committing adultery. In A Month of Sundays the over-sexed Thomas Masefield may be something of a unreliable narrator in his diaries that dominate the narrative, but I don’t think Updike is being ironical when Masefield makes the following theological point about adultery:
Adultery, my friends, is our inherent condition: ‘Ye have heard that it was said by them of old time, Thou shalt not commit adultery: But I say unto you, That whosoever looketh on a woman to lust after her hath committed adultery with her already in his heart’. But who that has eyes to see cannot so lust? Was not the First Divine Commandment received by human ears, ‘Be fruitful and multiply’? Adultery is not a choice to be avoided; it is a circumstance to be embraced. (44-45)
(See, also, how this Biblical quotation ‘parches’ Clarence’s throat when he delivers it in his sermon in In the Beauty of Lilies 52) Masefield’s reflections on adultery baldly address theological questions that are usually more subtly treated in the early novels like Marry Me or The Centaur. It is well-known that later in life Updike took up Barth’s theology, and the idea of ‘sympathy’ as the basis of faith. I don’t think it is a coincidence that this interest might be related to how Barth faced a witch-hunt by the Church when his long-standing extra-marital relationship came to light. So, Masefield ruminates:
Dear Tillich, that great amorous jellyfish, whose faith was a recession of beyond with thee two flecks in one or another pane: a sense of the word as ‘theonomous’, and a sense of something ‘unconditional’ within the mind. Kant’s saving ledge pared finer than a fingernail. Better Barth, who gives us opacity triumphant, and bids us adore; we do adore, what we also live in the world is its residue of resistance – these mortal walls that hold us to this solitude, the woman who resists being rolled over, who is herself. (192)
This Barthian-type attitude is also often accompanied by the adoption of animistic/Lawrentian tropes in Updike’s novels. In the epigram to The Centaur Barth is quoted by Updike:
Heaven is the creation inconceivable to man, earth the creation conceivable to him. He himself is the creature on the boundary between heaven and earth.
This novel is page-by-page infused with references to the complex- ambiguous figures of classical mythology. And so at school George Caldwell’s son is conscious of being ‘the petty receptacle of a myth’ that is spun around his late father. Early in the novel George is seen flirting with Vera Hummell in the school changing rooms where she likens him to a centaur, and he reflects that ‘His nether half, an imperfect servant of his will, preened itself’ (25).
Animism also crops up in the Maples stories. We find Richard Maples out one early morning in open countryside. Taking the wilderness as an opportunity:
Richard took off his clothes, all; he sat on a rough worm rock. The pose of thinker palled. He stood and at the water’s edge became a prophet, a Baptist; ripples of light reflected from the water onto his legs. He yearned to do something transcendent, something obscene… (104)
Animism informs Updike’s regular literary alternative spins on physics when describing the context of his characters’ actions. In the Maples stories Richard takes a sceptical stance on arguments about the world based on Newtonian and Einsteinian physics (135-6). And in the late novel, Villages, Updike has the intuitively pragmatic Owen call the mathematical logic of Frege and Russell ‘creepy’ (82). Similarly, in Seek My Face a contrast is found between the ‘soul’s expectations and bottomless appetite to the measured world of science and matter’ (65). But, of course, it is really human sexual agency in Updike’s fictional world that is the prime shaper of the human very earthly experience of time and space - seen in A Month of Sundays where sexual attraction is described as something that ‘curves space and time’ (125). And in Marry Me we find:
The world is composed of what we think it is; what we expect tends to happen; and what we expect is really what we desire. As a negative wills a print, she had willed Sally. 133
(Updike, though, will give physical determinants of human behaviour its due – for example, in Brazil, where we find the henchmen’s:
…two guns had, like pencils, redrawn the space of the room, reducing the finitude of possibilities to a few shallow tunnels of warped choice. Their spirits had all become very thin, walking the taut wires of the situation. (63)
Similarly, in the short story ‘Unstuck’, the snow-bound Mark hears his wife’s words ‘”If you are young” come to him faint and late, as if, because of the warping after-effect of the storm sound crossed the street from her side against the grain.’
I have dug these rather abstractly-stated ideas out of a range of Updike’s singular (i.e. not the series of ‘Rabbit’ Angstrom novels) novels. But I read them in the sway of Updike’s compelling literary prose. Yes, Updike always wrote ‘like a man’s man’, he was a writer of his time and place (reacting against the ingrained moral conservatism of 50s America – no small thing to do), and very few people now read him because the position he puts the reader into identifying with is, on the whole, probably politically incorrect. But the prose remains, despite so much of its content and positioning of the reader, and one cannot help but admire it for the way it conveys Updike’s ideas, how it makes us reexperience our understanding of human relationships in provoking, original, and always interesting ways. Updike revels in the detail, the minutiae of the human world and its physical – generally suburban America - and natural contexts, so apparently effortlessly and yet what must have been the result of a concentrated Flaubertian-dedication to the production of literary prose.
Updike regularly refers to the impressionists and other artists when describing moods, places, skies and nature. It is said that he wanted to be a painter, and his prose is often deeply pointillist in its detail. But there is also an unabashed emotive-impressionist colouring to this detail. Updike might be described as a writer in the genre of realism because his detailed prose creates mood, contextualizes the ‘action’ and underwrites our identification with his particular ‘truths to life’. But Updike is not a realist, and rejected a realist conception of ‘representation’, as is seen in the aesthetic discussions n Seek My Face:
This so-called ‘aesthetic’, he stated in his rather, high, affected voice, honed on years of education, Stanford and Columbia and with some English vowels picked up from a post-grad year in Oxford, concentrating not in art but in philosophy, back to the Greeks, back to ontology, ‘is merely the sensuous aspect of the world – it is not the end of art but a means, a means for egging at, let’s call it, the infinite background of feeling in order to condense it into an object of perception, These objects of perception are basically relational structures, which obliterate the need for representation.’ (Seek My Face 44)
In all probability Updike’s literary legacy will not be as a writer concerned with adultery in late 20th century America, but as one of the great writers of novelistic prose. In the Bech novellas Updike has his alter-ego, the writer Bech, consciously reflect on the process and aesthetics of writing and of being a writer. When Bech states that ‘actuality is a running impoverishment of possibility’ (The Complete Henry Bech 58) it is hard not to think that Updike is, glancingly, referring to Saul Bellow’s concern with ‘actuality’ and with all de-spirted conceptions of reality. Bech’s thinking:
[…]as Valery had predicted, did not come neatly, in chiming packets of language, but as slithering, overlapping sensations, micro-organisms of thought setting up in sum a panicked seat on Bech’s palms and a palpable nausea behind his belt. (89).

[Edward · Rating 3 out of 5]

Updike is best known for his four novels following the life of Rabbit Angstrom, an often confused white middle-class American., from his teen-age years to his death. But Updike also followed another character for nearly half a century, his fictional Henry Bech, a Jewish writer who is far from the Americana of Rabbit. This volume includes the twenty stories that Updike wrote about Bech over a period of forty years and along with the Rabbit books reveals Updike's America from two completely different perspectives.

Many of the Bech pieces are satirical, beginning with the foreword in which Bech addresses Updike, his author, and accuses him of committing the "artistic indecency of writing about a writer, but better, I suppose, about me than you." He goes on to mildly complain that Updike makes him sound like other Jewish writers at times - Normal Mailer, Philip Roth, Bernard Malamud, and J.D. Salinger, to name a few. But on the other hand, he commends Updike for pointing out how America "reduces her writers to imbecility an cozenage . . . veering between the harlotry of the lecture platform and the torture of the writing desk" and producing little of substance. Overall, though he doubts that Updike' stories about him will do much harm.

This self-referential joking complaint is at the heart of a number of these stories. The writer, Heny Bech, is often in a position where his self- importance is minimized by the society he lives in. Many of the initial stories are taken up with Bech's travels, first behind the Iron Curtain as a cultural ambassador for America. People are interested in him as a representative of the West and ask him endless questions about his books which bore him. He feels the complexities of America can never be fully understood by an outsider, especially those experienced by a Jewish writer. Later, he goes to western countries where he gives readings, autographs books, answers questions, is wined and dined. If there's an overriding concern in these stories, it's that the several novels that he has written have taken on a life of their own and he is pulled along in their wake as their author, a minor celebrity.

Updike's satire is generally on target. One illustrative story has Bech traveling to Israel with his Christian wife. Always the skeptic, she does her best to get Bech to appreciate the holy sites. It's illustrative as it shows a common problem Bech has - people are always trying to make him into something he isn't. Another story has Bech testifying in a court trial that a novel he wrote is not libelous, again trying to fit him into a mold.

Bech suffers from writer's block and is coasting along on the reputation of his few works. His reputation as an interesting but minor writer annoys Bech, but another book eludes him, largely because of distractions. He marries, finally, and moves to the suburbs before getting a divorce and marrying the woman's sister who has two children. Bech' efforts at being a stepfather are indifferent. He divorces again and moves back to the city and a more agreeable single life. Bech does manage to write another novel and to his surprise, it becomes popular and make him well-off, if not particularly happy. In the last story, Bech, always insecure, thinks back over his life and it seems to him that his books are empty, full of cleverness and falsity, and that his real masterpieces are all the women he has been involved with.

Bech is John Updike's alter-ego and gives Updike the chance to indirectly assess and criticize himself as a writer from another's perspective. A very clever game that Updike is playing, looking at himself in a constantly shifting fictional mirror.

[Hamish · Rating 4 out of 5]

I'm currently in my third year of a PhD program in clinical psychology. In addition to coursework, my thesis, and non-thesis research, I also work three days a week at a mental health clinic. I am regularly stressed and exhausted. When asked what we do for "self care" (a term I dislike), most of my fellow students and trainees report that they like to do exercise or watch tv or read genre lit or anything that allows them to rest their brains for a while. I'm no different. When I get home, I talk with my partner for a bit, pet my cat, and then I pour myself a beer, get into bed, put my headphones on (playing something instrumental), and read short stories for an hour. It's usually Updike. If you look at my feed, you'll see I've read a lot of Updike. Why Updike? Because he writes prose in a way that goes straight to the pleasure center of my brain. I don't necessarily engage with him on a particularly deep level; when I get home and I'm tired, I just want to read beautiful prose. It requires surprisingly little brain power.

I am well aware of the common criticisms of Updike's work and for the most part I won't disagree. His worldview is indeed fairly odious. His books are generally very similar. But my god, that prose. I never get tired of it. I could read it non-stop, every day.

So the Complete Henry Bech. Here we have some of his best stories and at least one major failure ("Bech Noir"). We have some surprisingly effective structural experiments ("Australia and Canada"). And we have lots and lots of wonderful prose, the kind of prose that makes anything interesting. This is helpful because, despite Updike's stated intention of making Bech as different from himself as possible, his inner world is virtually identical to just about every other Updike protagonist (except more neurotic. Jewish = neurotic, right Updike?). And of course there is the obsession with affairs (with one-dimensional, "naggy" women. Sigh) so pervasive in his work that even an Updike apologist like myself finds it tiresome. And yet, once again, the prose made me forgive all and lose myself in his writing.

[Lucas · Rating 3 out of 5]

Not very sharp. Updike has some novels that merely appear to be humorous, but when viewed a little closer they fail to have the luster one would expect. Once a writer can get anything published, bad money chases out the good. Of course, a bad Updike is as good as anyone from this generation, I have to say. It still falls short of some of the pearls from the same author that were cast in front of me in my youth.

[Grant Ellis · Rating 4 out of 5]

I found the first part quite slow and over written but then, as the book progressed the style seemed to become more fluid and reminiscent of the fantastic Rabbit series. Like many others I can't help thinking that Bech was Updike's alter ego and an opportunity to honestly reflect on a successful writers life with its political interest and critical over analysis.

[Charles Kerns · Rating 4 out of 5]

Beautiful excrescence of words. Detailed accounting of twentieth century literati. With no love, No compassion for his characters. He might as well be writing about dead fish with his cold, cold eye.

[Joan · Rating 5 out of 5]

This is a great book of stories. The usual wonderful writing by John Updike, interesting character, lots of humor and unexpected twists, Plus the added filip of knowing that he was writing from his own knowledge of the writing world.

[HansBlog · Rating 2 out of 5]

Vereinzelte Highlights, viel Käse. Meine ausführliche Meinung auf Deutsch steht hier:

https://hansblog.de/kritik-kurzgeschi...

[Alex · Rating 3 out of 5]

Artful prose and a likeable character, but the vignettes will leave you wanting.

[Kim · Rating 4 out of 5]

Three different collections of short stories featuring the Jewish, selfcentered, and objectively fairly mediocre author Henry Bech. Fun and interesting - and of course in the inimitable prosestyle of the Master novelist. But not close to the depth of his Rabbit-books (of which I have read the first two and will definitely read the other two as well). I suppose (hope) that these stories to Updike were “amusements” (of course referring to the term used by another of the greats, Graham Greene).

[Kay · Rating 2 out of 5]

i read this on a recommendation. i find updike very hard to read (e.g. rabbit, run). this book reminded me why: he writes about women as if they were another species, and not at all flattering. i realise it's supposed to be funny but even so, as a woman, i found myself disgusted by these 'creatures' he describes. that's supposed to be a woman? makes you wonder how he got through life being surrounded with half of the population made up of these disgusting creatures. this is a collection of short stories (which i didn't realise until the umpteenth time he reminds the reader he is a jewish writer - yes i got it, you're jewish, a writer. i got it!). in that respect, it might do with a short introduction explaining the dates over which these stories appeared (all the women, whether single, self-employed or whatever, are 'mistresses', just one indication of the dated material). either that or some editing. one story i kind of liked was the 'bulgarian poetess', only in that i have a bulgarian connection and was somewhat amused by it.

[Adam · Rating 5 out of 5]

Really great. A lot of quotable material in here. If you live in NY you will love it. Possible that deep enjoyment of this book requires you to live in NY. As Updike explains of his star: "he had the true New Yorker's secret belief that people living anywhere else had to be, in some sense, kidding."

There are many editions of this book and there are slight changes to the writing and different stories are included. I liked them all but it's frustrating to try to determine exactly what was published and or written when.

[James Violand · Rating 1 out of 5]

Four books of Updike's character.
Bech: The Book (1970)
An introduction to Updike’s character. Updike crams words into sentences like Contadina does tomatoes in cans. It takes forever to slog through. And he writes too often in metaphors. Bech is not a very sympathetic figure: he’s selfish, self-pitying and prone to misogyny. He is saved by keen wit as is this work.
Bech is Back
Intolerably boring. Who cares about Bech? I couldn’t continue with this entire collection and will sell this swill to someone who appreciates John Updike – if there is any such person.

[Charlie · Rating 4 out of 5]

Hadn't read any Updike before this. The character comes across as unbelievably inconsistent, but this stems from the serialization. These stories appear decades apart as Updike uses Beck to explore different pieces of the literary life. He does a brilliant job of pulling disparate threads together to create this novel, but it never feels like a work conceived in one piece. Definitely will interest me in pursuing other works by Updike.

[Aaron Schlafly · Rating 1 out of 5]

After thououghly enjoying the Rabbit books and hoping they could continue, I wasn't able to finish this one (though my enthusiasm carried me through a few of the four books before I stopped). I found the stories behind the Iron Curtain interesting, but the character was not likable and the whole book was so absorbed in literary circle navel gazing that I was really turned off. Rabbit looked out at the world, but Bech stares sneeringly into his own literary world.

[Deb · Rating 4 out of 5]

Henry Bech's adventures take him through many time zones and encounters...all the while his dialogue and inner thoughts are captured in that uniquely Updike way.
Very enjoyable book with a few 'odd' chapters - the latter part did not ring entirely true; especially 'killer Henry'...but it was fun to read.
Have to say for those who know much of Updike's work, Henry Bech is altogether less likeable than Rabbit. But that's just my opinion!

[Amy Wolf · Rating 4 out of 5]

An hysterical account of Updike's ficticious Jewish author, Henry Bech. Updike proves himself a master of comedy as we follow the hapless Beck through affairs with undergrads & massive writer's block. My favorite moment comes when he is sent to a beach to autograph stacks of his books, and finally, actually forgets how to write his own name! Priceless.

[Kate · Rating 4 out of 5]

Perhaps greater than the sum of its parts, due to Updike's sly humor. I enjoyed Malcolm Bradbury's introduction, which I read after finishing the text; it made me want to read the whole collection again in the light of his comments. I wish the collection had included the interviews of Bech by his creator, which Bradbury refers to.

[Bryan · Rating 5 out of 5]

Updike's best, better than the Rabbit series in my opinion. Bech is referred to as Updike's alter-ego; he travels the globe in these books- the wailing wall has to be my favorite location. Highly recommended.

[Robert · Rating 5 out of 5]

Bliss. A whole new Updike character that I'd never got around to.

[Ryan · Rating 4 out of 5]

Solid Updike. Very enjoyable overall but "Bech Noir" was over the top and bizarre. Still, I'd recommend the collection as a whole.

[Thom Dunn · Rating 5 out of 5]

A sparkling, on-going send-up of the Lit Biz.