BECH TO THE FUTURE

...The character is Harry "Rabbit" Angstrom, a small-town, lower-middle-class Pennsylvanian, who selfishly but gloriously believes "there's something out there that wants me to find it...

...You're Fifties...

...Jonathan Raban, for example, was positively venomous when Bech appeared in England: Updike's style—or ironic hyperbole, glittering, exact, yet thrown away with a casual, disarming grin—is as winning and as polished as the people from whose voice it derives...

...It is at least true that to appreciate Updike requires a willingness to forgo dramatic excitement...

...Born in 1932, Updike sold his first story to the New Yorker in 1954, the same year he finished college at Harvard...

...A frequent concern of Updike's is infidelity resulting from a deep yearning not to close off possibility...

...Never mind...

...In all five stories in Bech at Bay, we experience one of the pleasures of reading anything by Updike: his ability to grasp any material that swims into his view...

...The idea of "Bech Noir," Updike has explained, was prompted by the Library of America's recent publication of a two-volume collection of American mystery fiction...

...More fervently than he was a Jew," we discover, "Bech was a writer, a literary man...

...There's computer hacking (in "Bech Noir"), the law of libel (in "Bech Pleads Guilty," Bech is sued for mocking a Hollywood agent), ethnic food (in Los Angeles, "nimble Japanese in chef hats slice steak and vegetables into a kind of edible origami"), and the ambivalence of Eastern Europeans toward the history of their Jews (in "Bech in Czech...

...Though he intended to be a cartoonist (and attended the Ruskin School at Oxford), he returned to the United States and became instead a staff writer for the New Yorker...

...Michael Novak has analyzed this as Updike's "Platonic inner world," in which "myth and symbol are his necessary tools...

...The difference is not that great...

...Fifties...

...The Nobel committee," he says, "is not in search of aging, white Western men these days...

...The fictional Bech writes the forward for the real Updike, saying "I don't suppose your publishing this little jeu [Updike's pun on Jew?] of a book will do either of us drastic harm...

...In Updike's account, Henry Bech was born in 1923 in the New York City he's never really left, moving from his childhood "9th Street brownstone" in Brooklyn to a "shabby large apartment" at 97th and Riverside Drive, and to a loft in Little Italy when he comes into money...

...Indeed, in his forties, Updike was told by some critics that he was a sure bet to win the Nobel Prize because he had created a character, "which no one does these days...

...Some writers do...

...Bech is "the writer in me, creaking but lusty, battered but undiscourageable, fed on the blood of ink and the bread of white paper...

...Not quite as vieux chapeau as I had every reason to fear," allowed Gore Vidal in the New York Review of Books...

...In interviews, Updike has said he gave Bech the Nobel Prize partly to "end the speculation" that he himself might receive it...

...What harms could there be in art...

...Updike's politics, like his character's, are unclear but certainly not radical (a liberal critic once sniffed that the only federal program Updike seems to support is the U.S...

...Mail...

...Guggenheim Fellowship holders, liberal democrats, occasional contributors to late-night chat programs on TV, mild anglophiles with an etiolated passion for seafood...

...These stories are mostly playful...

...In this latest collection, a tall Swedish woman is, "in her splendor, frightening," and Bech notices that the world seemed to hold . . . more and more women over six feet in height—whole clusters of them—as if Nature, no longer designing women close to the ground for purposes of childbearing and domestic labor, were launching them toward some function as yet unknown...

...It lets him express his most ironical thoughts about critics, writing, and himself...

...They know they will never write as well as he does, so they are saying, in effect, that he is too skilled and that this somehow stands in the way of 'greatness.'" Updike was barely forty when some critics decided he had failed to live up to his early promise, and he has suffered for a quarter of a century under their charge that he fails to write about important subjects with a political slant...

...The suburbs, with all its grass, bees, and WASPs, had always made him uneasy...

...But he discovered the literary world was a battlefield—mined with hatred, rimmed with snipers...

...The latest Bech volume, Bech at Bay, has the subtitle "A Quasi-Novel," because—as Updike explains—he decided to complete another Bech book after writing the first story in the collection, a forty-pager about Bech in Prague for the New Yorker...

...Over the years, for example, he traced the marital infidelities of the middle-class Richard and Joan Maples through a series of stories collected in the 1979 Too Far to Go...

...Updike must be the only American writer ever to combine such grace Margaret Boerner teaches English at Villanova University...

...The novelist Cynthia Ozick once complained that Bech's Jewishness consists of being called Jewish by Updike, with a few Yiddish words thrown in...

...The block was broken in the second book, Bech is Back, only by his new wife in the suburbs ordering him to finish something because "We need the dough...

...But the structure of this new volume turns out to be not all that different from the structure of the first two— except perhaps that the linked stories in Bech at Bay culminate in a threefold climax as, in his seventies, Bech becomes a murderer, a father, and a Nobel Prize winner...

...But that is exactly what gives Updike the simultaneous closeness and distance to use the Bech stories, as he says, "to write about being a writer...

...Bech/Updike scans the critics, the prize givers, the publicity agents, the Soviet-bloc exchange writers, the television interviewers ("Charlie [Rose] was wonderful...

...Where Updike is an all-American Protestant, Bech is an all-American Jew...

...A much-anthologized account of an American writer's literary passion behind the Iron Curtain, it was written after Updike had received the National Book Award for The Centaur, been elected a member of the National Institute of Arts and Letters, and lectured in an American-Soviet cultural exchange program...

...some don't...

...And, of course, these snippets of criticism that drift through Bech's murderous consciousness are a grab bag of phrases fashioned by critics to castigate Updike himself...

...Not even upper...

...Middle-middle...

...He is eventually helped at murder by his admiring, computer-literate amanuensis, who (like Barbara Stanwyck in Double Indemnity) is turned on by his daring—so turned on, in fact, that she later blackmails him into fatherhood...

...Bech is a middle-aged, cultivated white American male with an exquisite ear and eye for the way other people speak and behave...

...He will always turn down a potential myth in favor of investigating the look of a thing, the subtlety of emotional response, the shining through of the ideal into the ordinary...

...What he seems to be looking for in his secular, assimilated Jewish-American writer is a character with which to express the way in which many Americans feel themselves to be something-Americans: slightly hyphenated people who stand both entirely inside the culture and just a little bit outside—which is not a bad definition of the job of a novelist...

...The brilliant Rabbit, Run (1961) was published when he was only twenty-nine and marked him as a major American writer...

...Bech is splashed across the cover of Vogue "modeling a corduroy coat and a ribbed wool turtleneck," as Updike was on the cover of Time...

...I hardly said a word"), the students, the lawyers, the readers, and "all these Brits who were breeding like woodlice in the rotting log piles of the New York literary industry...

...James Joyce did both with the peregrinations of Leopold Bloom in Ulysses, and Dickens was incapable of setting pen to paper without inventing memorable myths...

...He had dedicated himself early to what appeared plainly a good cause, art...

...Updike knows why he is so fond of Bech...

...So is Updike...

...He seems as well never to have suffered writer's block...

...Certainly Updike does not write about fashionable, politically correct subjects...

...Saul Bellow won the prize that could have gone to Updike, and there isn't a spare one left...

...So is Updike...

...Updike followed Rabbit through three more novels, written at ten-year intervals as the character grew older but hardly wiser: Rabbit Redux (1971), Rabbit Is Rich (1981), and Rabbit at Rest (1990)—the last two both receiving the Pulitzer Prize...

...After fifty years of trying to rise above criticism, he liberated himself to take it personally...

...His work is peopled by contemporaneous, middle-class, white Americans—while his writing, in its detail, metaphors, symbols, and epiphanies, is rich with the history of literature and the culture...

...Perhaps that makes Updike a sort of counter-Mary Shelley...

...We have over fifty books from the man, delivered over forty years: a cornucopia of stories, novels, novellas, poems, essays, and book reviews...

...with such output, and he is easily the best American writer now alive...

...Thus, where Updike is a suburban, married father, Bech is an urban bachelor, ten years older than his creator...

...It is sometimes alleged that he "has little to say and expends his considerable verbal gifts on trivial matters...

...Bech turns to murder in "Bech Noir," the penultimate story in the book, just before "Bech and the Bounty of Sweden" confers the Nobel Prize upon him to the groans of the critics, only John Simon rising to his defense with a piece entitled "The Case (Far-Fetched) for Henry Bech...

...As even Erica Jong once observed, "The claim of some of his detractors—that he has too much technique—seems transparently envious to me...

...But, in fact, Updike's intent is not to convey the Jewish immigrant and religious experience...

...Bech kills the first critic impulsively, the next two at carefully planned long distance, and the last face to face...

...Updike often revisits his characters...

...But that marriage broke up soon after Think Big finally saw the light of day, and Bech moved back to the city to which his heart belonged...

...Where Updike is prolific, Bech is blocked...

...Few both write well and invent great myths...

...minor, minorer, minormost...

...But Mary Shelley, for example, had only one of these gifts: She couldn't write to save her life, but her tale of Frankenstein's monster is myth-making at its greatest...

...But the stories do not lack the virtues of the author's more serious work...

...What enemies could there be...

...Updike collected his first batch of stories about his writing alter-ego in 1970 with Bech, and returned to his character in 1982, winning his second Time magazine cover with Bech Is Back...

...A beguilingly festive disaster," decreed John Leonard in the daily Times...

...In Bech, we learn that Bech wrote a well-received first novel, Travel Light, and a novella, Brother Pig, in the 1950s...

...Bech explains that he had not always been an evil man...

...Not everyone finds the difference convincing...

...But it surely owes something as well to Theatre of Blood, the campy 1973 horror movie in which Vincent Price, a sawdust thespian, exacts a baroque revenge on six theater reviewers...

...Bech is a middle-class writer from a poorish background...

...Henry Bech was first seen in a 1966 story, "The Bulgarian Poetess...

...It's . . . upper-middlebrow . . . trash...

...As he aged into the ranks of the elderly, adverse phrases from the far past surfaced in his memory, word for word—"says utterly nothing with surprising aplomb," "too toothless or shrewd to tackle life's raw meat...

...But Henry Bech—a character that with his latest collection, Bech at Bay, Updike has now visited for the third time—is unmarried and faces more problems with creativity than fidelity...

...But we should add that the committee is also not in search of writing with realistic characters and plots set in our own times...

...The pleasure of dealing with him again . . . could not be resisted, so here he is again, Bech at Bay, even passe, seventy-five if a day, but my heart's irrepressible darling...

...Updike has recently joked (on The Charlie Rose Show, of course) that when he moved from New York to Ipswich, he "left Bech" in New York "to watch over things...

...It evokes those clever, furry, peripatetic Americans who slip from theater foyers in London to the great libraries and museums of Europe...

...In particular, they exhibit his intense melding of the keenly observed stuff of the concrete world with its symbolic potential...

...But after two years he retired to New England—where he has been writing, largely about the suburbs and smalltown America, ever since...

...Think Big was a popular success, largely because of its sex scenes, and Updike indulges himself in composing critical notices for his fictional character's fiction: "The squalid book we all deserve," said Alfred Kazin in the New York Times Book Review...

...He is basically a short-story writer who does not have the gift for inventing great myths or sustaining plot development...

...it was the theme of the bestselling Couples in 1968 and The Witches of Eastwick in 1984...

...A dying critic's last, gasping words to Bech are: "Your stuff . . . won't last...

...If, however, Bech really is as unlike Updike as Updike can still "connect with," then he can't connect a very long way...

...This is probably correct...

...Updike has insisted that Bech is a writer as "different" from himself as he "could make him and still connect with him...

...Updike's Jewish novelist is the manifestation of a writer's sense of being inside/outside the social world he observes...

...Then, in 1963, he published his would-be masterpiece, a long novel called The Chosen, to reviews so bad that fifteen years of writer's block resulted...