Word: beches
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UPDIKE HAS DONE IT AGAIN. THE ABSURDLY PROLIFIC Boston area writer of nearly 50 tomes of poetry, criticism, children's literature and fictive adventures in sensuality-cum-neuroses, John Updike '54 brings us in Bech at Bay a fourth installment of the now aging Manhattan Jewish novelist, Henry Bech. In four short stories, Updike deftly sketches the extremely self-conscious life of a minor writer whose laurels and curls alike are withering on his crown and whose...
Highly cerebral and sensual at the same time, the recently divorced Bech is truly close to no one, but knowledgeable about everyone. From this privileged position, he delivers dispassionate, wry judgment on all and sundry; perhaps a sad situation, but a much more entertaining one for us, the readers. Nor does he inspire much pity in us, so crusty and self-sufficient does he seem. The novel is written from Bech's own point of view, and opens on the grizzled, still prodigiously randy gentleman touring the Czech Republic with lissome, admiring dissidents hanging from his gnarled elbows...
...Bech Presides," the second episode, our star gathers youthful Communists and waxes presidential, taking on, and to his surprise, relishing the leadership of a self-congratulatory honorary intellectual society, "The Forty," a sort of farcical Academie Francaise whose time, like that of its graying laureate-members, is long past...
...BECH...
Back home in Manhattan he agrees to serve as president of "the Forty," an honorary association of artists whose aging members no longer find anyone younger worthy of filling vacancies left by the deceased. "If we don't ever manage to elect anybody," Bech lectures the group, "the institution will dwindle to nothing." Who would care? Not Bech's current mistress, Martina, who dismisses the Forty as "a bunch of mostly New York City has-beens electing themselves." Updike has one surprise for his beleaguered hero: the 1999 Nobel Prize for Literature. Anyone who thinks this stunning recognition will...