Word: beches
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Updike's elfin revenge includes a six-page bibliography of Bech's works as well as criticism of them. Travel Light, Bech's highly praised first novel, seems to carry strains of Kerouac's On the Road and Bellow's The Adventures of Augie March. Brother Pig, a novella, hints ever so slightly of Mailer's stylishly oblique and politically muddled Barbary Shore ("Puzzling Porky" is Updike's title for the TIME review). When the Saints, a collection of essays and sketches of the kind that often get published from the sheer momentum...
...Lately Bech's fiction has taken a 180-degree turn for the worse, but his life at least continues to be buoyed by his awareness of the irony of his situation: the quantity of his material rewards is inversely proportional to the quality of his production...
...Bech looks like a "mob-controlled congressman from Queens hoping to be taken for a Southern Senator." Fat lecture invitations are as available as women anxious to add a famous notch to their bedposts. In the three funniest adventures, Bech is sent by the State Department on a cultural-exchange junket behind the Iron Curtain. The tableaux of culturecrats in opulent neo-czarist settings undoubtedly come from Updike's memories of his own U.S.-sponsored tour of Russia in 1964. For Bech. the trip proves to be a sort of thinking man's "Mission: Impossible," in which Bech...
...Russia, where he endures the blatant irony of having a huge salad of royalty rubles thrust on him, Bech and the head of the Soviet Writers' Union joust with vodka glasses: "He toasts Jack London, I toast Pushkin. He does Hemingway, I do Turgenev. I do Nabokov, he counters with John Reed." Elsewhere, Bech vainly attempts to charm Yevtushenko by describing his own position in America not as a literary lion but as a "graying, furtively stylish rat indifferently permitted to gnaw and roam behind the wainscoting of a firetrap about to be demolished anyway...
...Rumania, where he comes to think of himself as "a sort of low-flying U-2," Bech attends an underground cabaret that features an endless number of variety acts, including an East German girl in a cowboy outfit singing Dip in the Hot of Texas. Humor at the expense of literal or imprecise translation is rampant. An admirer slathering to translate Bech into Bulgarian asks, "You are not a wet writer, no. You are a dry writer...