Updike in a Foreign Country

...How strange," Bech ruminates, "that his happiness in Scotland should take the form of being mean to her...

...Bech suggests a title (Think Big, which he prefers to Easy Money) and Flaggerty's eyes widen...

...You're really rolling...

...We are probably destined in the year 2000 to catch up with a geriatric Rabbit, and in the next century some conglomerate publisher will no doubt receive one or two packages from the universe next door: Bech Dead and Rabbit Regains Paradise...

...Richin Russia" ends with Bech, at a loss to spend his accumulated rubles, leaving the country with gifts of fox and mink furs blowing in the airport wind while his Soviet guide Ekaterina shouts in anguish, "Gen-ry, the books...

...In his Foreword to the first Bech book, Updike twits his author for the Jewish intensity with which he phrases the same lament: "No revolutionary has concerned himself with our oppression, with the silken mechanism whereby America reduces her writers to imbecility and cozenage...

...When he meets his personal editor, Flaggerty, with his uncanny dreamy smile, Bech has the strange sensation that Flaggerty has not so much read the book as inhaled it, that it "had been melted down and evaporated in these slice-of-pie-shaped offices and sent into the ozone to join the former contents of aerosol cans...

...But when it comes to the Jewish writer's emotional imagination and his true metier, the drama of the soul, Updike is in a foreign country...

...a drab sublet in New York City—without acknowledging how good he really is...

...It is intriguing to realize how very intelligent John Updike is, yet how much that intelligence is a matter purely of atmosphere and language—very different indeed from the analytical intelligence of the Jewish novelists who have so magnetized him...

...This difference of intelligence makes it easy for Updike to envision the words a Jewish writer might say (like "Craziness, down through history, has performed impressively...

...Whether at home with his new wife and her three children, restoring the banister to its original natural oak, grinding out (with his spouse's determined encouragement) a big new novel that sounds dishearten-ingly like the author's Couples with a Lesbian postscript, or Third-Worlding it with lectures to the Koreans and Ghanaians on "American Humor in Twain, Tarkington and Thurber," the Jewish element in Bech is exceedingly hard to locate...

...Not so strange as pausing, amid the alien potatoes, to brood over one more marital slight...

...Or "There seemed no overweening reason why Russia and America, those lovable paranoid giants, could not happily share a globe so big and blue...

...Not really an intellectual, he can be caught out in such unfinished thoughts and loose remarks as the one about Arabs being the blacks of Israel...

...Slim young men, they came and went silently, accepting orders and serving while the lively, genial, grizzled, muscular intellectuals talked...

...An amusing major theme of Bech is Back is the cornucopia of temptations dangled before the contemporary novelist to lure him from his typewriter...

...Anyway, let's face it, Henry, you're the top of the line...

...The Poorhouse Fair and Of the Farm, he has been making his books thicker, his sentences longer, Rabbit richer...

...Doreen Pease is a new and scary breed who has read Bech's early novel, Travel Light, in Irv-ington High School ("It stayed with me...

...His no-nonsense wife eggs him mercilessly on to productivity?It's loose...

...Perhaps he has the wasp advantage of being able to eat hispirozhki and laugh about them...

...These are the responses of a Jewish writer during his first visit to Jerusalem...

...as Russian novels spill from his overpacked suitcase...

...Bech, son of a Marxist, is rather nervous in these historical surroundings, and following a quick reference to New Testament hills, Updike takes him back to something they can both handle: consideration of his wife's unesthetic "yipping" noises in bed...

...They identify us, betray us, and in Bech Is Back, more often than not, entertain us...

...students phone in the middle of the night to rebuke him, "Embrace your ethnicity, man...

...Updike undoubtedly has a genius for conveying chronic tensions between male and female, for painting a rueful portrait of marriage brushed simultaneously with flecks of an old Tolstoyan sympathy for one's mate and splotches of anxious modern bellicosity...

...But who are we to tell Updike that he can't go home again...

...Updike could not care less about Dun Robin and Loch Ness...

...Now, 12 years later, Bech is back and Updike has definitely gone too far, swooping him (courtesy of the State Department) through a whirlwind "cultural exchange" tour of seven Third-World countries, then grounding him in the peevish marital complaints of the familiar Updike hero...

...The most hilarious episode of the book is the telephone introduction of Bech to the editor-in-chief of his old publishing house, Vellum Press, now owned by a West Coast lumber and shale oil conglomerate...

...He has regretted in interviews that he knows so little about the ordinary working world...

...Cedar Meadow must have been named in a fit of rural nostalgia, for the town was a close-built brick huddle centered on a black river and a few gaunt factories...

...More subliminal leverage...

...Much too capricious to be more than a wet blanket over romance, Updike alio ws the unpredictably genial and witty side of himself (by far the better half) to take over when he sizes up other forms of susceptibility and adulteration...

...She is sending a limo to pick up his manuscript because "it saves a fortune in the time sector...

...Bech: A Book, the most unexpected and clever of the volumes that followed, fulfilled the rather nervy ambition of this Congregationalist to speak in the cadences and mannerisms of a Jewish writer...

...and John Leonard ("A beguilingly festive disaster...

...and he dines with a rich Communist in Caracas for the U.S...

...nearly led him to drive through it, up its mean steep streets and down and on to tomorrow's Holiday Inn, near a Men-nonite normal school...

...Bech does attend a dinner with some Israeli writers, but the conversation is sparse and sympathies veer mainly to the Arabs who, "Bech perceived, are the blacks of Israel...

...Unpublished for 15 years, Bech nevertheless has his fans and even collectors (like Marvin Federbusch...

...No wonder he has grown so waspish that we cannot distinguish him from the wasp husband of Marry Me...

...Here Bech is impelled to observe (justly) that "His artist's eye, always, was drawn to the irrelevant: the overlay of commercialism upon this ancient way fascinated him...

...maybe television has so accustomed the novelist to seeing his own image while he talks that he now believes anything, including sales reports, are fair game for fiction...

...Only if he is created with or by a goyisher kopf...

...His Episcopalian wife Bea is enraptured by the cypresses and churches of Jerusalem and the spectacle moves her to a blushing admission of connubial urgency...

...I like it...

...In the most substantial portion of this collection, "Bech Wed," muddled marriage is once again Updike's beat...

...We can even enjoy a touch of vengefulness as he imagines his reviews by Alfred Kazin ("The squalid book we all deserve...

...At any rate, in Bech: A Book, into which Updike put much more narrative energy than he saved for its sequel, he is very funny about the cultural irony of the writer's predicament...

...leaving him uncertain about the results, and he is ill at ease with Bea's friends who come for morning coffee and smile brightly over their crisp dickeys stuck into cashmere sweaters...

...Still, Updike's territory, words, also count...

...His friends could do worse, however, than advise him to quit forever the (for him) lugubrious preoccupation with sex and marriage...

...He can now, by lecturing, trips abroad, conferences, seminars, and multimedia interviews, contrive to keep respectably busy without ever putting a word on paper...

...But the notion that Bech is either literally or phantasmagorically Jewish finally reaches the level of the preposterous in the story (more accurately, spotty travel diary) titled "The Holy Land...

...Reviewed by Isa Kapp In John Updike's new collection of stories, Henry Bech, a famous Jewish American writer "who in his middle years had all but ceased to write," yet whose reputation seems to have a life of its own, impulsively decides to visit Mr...

...Like Rabbit Run, Bech Is Back begins with a description of driving into a town in central Pennsylvania...

...a drafty, crumbling mock Tudor house in Ossining...

...Lest anyone suspect that a racial angle lurks in this lopsided travelogue, I can testify that in the Scottish setting of "Macbech" the behavior of the Bech and Bea combo is equally incongruou-The writer upbraids his wife for a distressing episode in her Scotch ancestors' history, the "Clearances" which pushed poor farmers off their soil so that rich landowners could graze their sheep there...

...The unexpected reality of this place, so elaborate and layered in its way, so El Grecoesque and sad between its timbered hills...

...Although Updike has too irritating a literary personality to be the logical candidate for America's best novelist, it is hard to come upon his intaglio sketches of American places—a printing plant in Rabbit's stagnant hometown of Brewer...

...He could easily be, in addition, the butt of the joke that Italians die of heart trouble, the French of cirrhosis of the liver, and Americans of enthusiasm...

...On the other hand, it is fun for the reader to find Updike out in the big lively world of impersonal rather than personal corruption...

...and put his reprints into a Rhode Island School'of Design format that "gives the shopper a handle on whatnot/ are all about, as opposed to the individual title...

...None of this satire requires deep thought or feeling, and there is in fact some question whether the business and publicity of writing are legitimate subjects for novels...

...Or Bech remembering New York: "The people I knew all subscribed to Commentary before it went fascist...

...a dean urges him to speak at a commencement in Kansas...

...Federbusch, the foremost collector of Bechiana, including all foreign-language editions...

...Ever the artist, Bech notices that the female novelist is overweight but flirtatious, and he ponders the lag between the fading of an attractive woman's conception of herself and the fading of the reality...

...Bech is now a moving cog in the literature industry...

...After a page and a half about Herod, the hero's thoughts turn to California and the rejection of his novel, Travel Light, by Hollywood producers...

...The urban author is out of place in his wife's suburban house where "squirrels or was it bats danced over his head," and he keeps his one window closed against the distracting variety of bird calls...

...Jewish life and the Israeli population go virtually unnoticed in this voyage to Jerusalem...

...Among our better writers, he is surely the most American, with his continuing sense of wonder, his pleasure in the open road, and his love (perhaps the only genuine one in his fiction) for the native landscape...

...Information Agency...

...Eventually Bea retreats into a furious obsession with her teen-age daughter's loss of virginity, blaming Bech's erotic novel for her fall, and Bech, demoralized, goes the way of Updikeans, committing adultery with his sister-in-law...

...Eager to cover much more territory than there was scope for in his fine, small early novels...

...or how he might feel in his senses (the urban Bech squirming in country greenery...

...Updike exactly catches the play of moods between the momentarily helpless American visitor and the permanently entrapped Russian guide, and as usual the tone comes out marvelously right...

...Though heconvincing-ly portrays the linotype setter in Rabbit Redux and has done thorough enough research to create an authentic African dictator in The Coup, the truth is that compared to a large-minded novelist like Dickens or even a smaller-minded one like the maligned James Gould Cozzens, Updike and his characters give the impression of living in a stale domestic backwater that no amount of verbal athleticism can refresh...

...To boot, he has just received the Melville Medal "awarded every five years to that American author who has maintained the most meaningful silence...