The New Updike

...On our next encounter he had been issued in hard cover...

...In these stories Bech moves against a background assembled quickly from small scattered bits of observation...

...some fragment of Updike himself clings to Bech...

...No nuance of character has escaped Updike's vision, not even the lurking inadequacy Bech feels in the face of imagined Wasp superiority...

...It is a remarkable and diverting revelation of what this country does to its writers and what they in turn must do to survive...

...From the Aeroflot plane that "smelled like his uncles' backroom in Williamsburg, of swaddled heat and proximate potatoes, boiling," to an automobile trip to Brasov, land of the vampires, to the description of Sofia and its "trolley cars salvaged from the remotest corner of Bech's childhood," we are made aware, as in the best travel writing, of the quality of both place and observer...

...and the Bulgarian poetess, Vera Glavanskova, with whom Bech falls in love...

...Thus ended my first meeting with Bech...

...Or do they survive...

...a Rumanian chauffeur, surely a distant relative of Dracula himself...

...Bech: A Book, a collection of John Updike's seven short pieces about Henry Bech, reveals the man in toto...

...As deftly as that boy slips a knife in a clam, Updike pries apart Bech's protective covering to reveal the vulnerable creature within...

...He has recorded Bech's life as a series of public performances counterpointed by private humiliations, the whole made somehow bearable by occasional infusions of sex and alcohol...

...Some of the most effective appear to be rambling on in several directions, but at the end a single sentence, acting as signpost, points back to the beginning and tumbles all the events in between into new perspective...

...Their irritating traits scrape against us, as they do against Bech, but they are all, except for the chauffeur, "good?good people," as Bech notes in the foreword...

...But in Bech: A Book he has created an altogether different character from an altogether different tradition...

...Until now, his work has been chiefly a reflection of small-town life colored by the Protestant ethic: rolling hills country air and clapboard churches...

...I use the word remarkable advisedly, for this little volume is in some ways a complete departure for Updike...

...Besides presenting a radically new character, Bech: A Book also marks the virtual disappearance of Updike's distinctive lyric style...

...Just as he was contemplating one more love affair, one that might "bring him safe into that high calm pool of immortality where Proust and Hawthorne and Catullus float, glassy-eyed and belly-up," I was summoned to the dentist's chair...

...These stories represent Updike at his technical best, controlling a seemingly episodic structure in which every incident proves crucial to the overall effect...

...Consider this rumination about a former student who has invaded Bech's sanctuary at a fashionable seaside resort: "The boy had that Wasp knowingness, that facility with things: he knew how to insert a clam-knife, how to snorkle (just to put on the mask made Bech gasp for breath), how to bluff and charm his way onto private beaches (Bech believed everything he read...

...A phrase here, two sentences there, and the remote places emerge alive with sight, smell and sound...

...In the opening paragraphs of "Rich in Russia," for example, a leoturer addresses us...

...The monumental writing block with which Bech wrestles in these pages takes on the proportions of a Biblical drought...

...Leafing through a tattered copy of the New Yorker the dentist had provided as entertainment for his patients, I came upon a story called "Bech Swings...

...There is Ekaterina, Bech's companion and translator-escort in Russia, a pale, thin spinster with a wart on her nose and a comic-book vocabulary...

...then the final sentence returns us abruptly to the lecture hall...

...If all this sounds slightly cruel, it is not...

...Dozens of frail, funny beings are brought forward for our inspection...

...Yet Updike invades Bech's close, intellectual environment with dazzling ease, and with no weapons other than honesty and wit...

...The pace accelerates, incidents and discoveries crowd one another...

...His sensibility has been formed by asphalt and ailanthus, by generations of old men who drank tea from glasses...

...And it is not so heartlessly funny that it ceases to be sad, as well...

...The first three pieces in the book, which recount Bech's adventures as a cultural emissary in Russia, Rumania and Bulgaria, are an unusual combination of narrative and superior travel writing...

...It began by describing the arrival in London of one Henry Bech, a writer whose reputation had waxed even as he felt his powers waning...

...The plight of this writer, victim of public expectations and inner anxieties, is not unfamiliar...

...Perhaps such writing is inappropriate to the purposes of irony and to the character of Bech...

...Potentially romantic images are turned awry: A dainty description of a tree full of birds is transmuted by the observation that it "emitted volumes of chirping sound like a great leafy loudspeaker...

...Updike's ultimate triumph, however, is to make his glittering technique seem effortless...

...Since publication of a last (poorly received) novel six years before, Bech had managed to produce nothing more than several magazine articles and the designs of four rubber stamps for printing messages on his correspondence...

...One flick of a phrase has bracketed the story and defined its mood...

...Herein lies the final irony, as Henry Bech would be the first to recognize...

...Whatever the reason, each sentence here is terse and clean...

...Updike has superbly modulated his style to express a rueful, funny, acid point of view...

...one senses four or five words thrown away for the one finally selected...

...Bech is the quintessential New York-Jewish man of letters...

...He has observed in Bech a shrewd eye, the instincts of a circus clown, and a tendency to deploy wisecracks as part of a personal anti-ballistic-missile system...

...Gradually his voice fades and we are drawn into an account of a wild spending spree...