Word: beches
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...Bech Is Back by John Updike. Henry Bech, an exquisitely blocked author, returns, marries and almost accidentally produces a bestseller in one of Updike's most adroit and lively comic performances...
...barrel has been with me some 20 years, but I haven't quite hit the bottom." Should he ever do so, he comforts himself with the thought that he could, a la Bech, "scratch along without writing another word. The literary world is thriving. There are a lot of people out there who want to look at a writer...
...sensitive outsider from the sticks did not measure up to prevailing standards. In Commentary, Norman Podhoretz complained, "His short stories ... strike me as all windup and no delivery." Bruised by appraisals like this, Updike eventually turned his hurt feelings to good use: "Out of that unease, I created Henry Bech to show that I was really a Jewish writer also...
...will do almost anything to get Leslie Fiedler to smile upon him. He never smiled on me." Indeed he did not. The champion of Norman Mailer and John Earth once called Updike "a strangely irrelevant writer." Updike later took gentle but effective revenge. At the end of Bech: A Book, a mock bibliography lists critical works on the imaginary author, including "Fiedler, Leslie, 'Travel Light: Synopsis and Analysis,' E-Z Outlines, No. 403 (Akron, O.: Hand-E Student Aids...
...kind of sweet panic growing lighter and quicker and quieter, he runs. Ah: runs. Runs." Updike's men are lovers of the here and now and not afraid to look foolish while saying so. Piet Hanema in Couples, Harry Angstrom in the three Rabbit novels, Bech, assorted adolescents and husbands in the short stories: all act in childlike confidence, as if their surroundings have been put there specifically for them to enjoy. In a typical Updike domestic scene, the young people are more cynical than their parents. Rabbit's disagreeable son Nelson sees and awkwardly ridicules his father...