Word: beches
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...Bech Is Back concerns an obverse, almost perverse antiself. Henry Bech is Jewish; John Updike is Wasp. Bech suffers from a 13-year-old writer's block. Updike averages a book a year. Bech is an unathletic urbanite. Updike is an enthusiastic sportsman and a countryman. Once these disparities have been marked, the author is free to play with words, with personae, even with whole nations...
Does Updike withdraw to his study to write three pages every weekday? Bech instead takes up the literary
...life: "The author [Bech] in these thin times supported himself by appearing at colleges. There, he was hauled from the creative-writing class to the faculty cocktail party to the John D. Benefactor Memorial Auditorium and thence, baffled applause still ringing in his ears, back to the Holiday Inn." Did Updike, invited by the Franklin Library, once agree to sign 20,000 volumes of Rabbit Run on the island of St. Thomas? Bech is lured by Su-perbooks, a subsidiary of the Superoil Corp., to autograph 28,500 sheets, at $1.50 each (Updike was paid a bit more...
...extremis, Bech becomes a wandering minstrel for the U.S. State Department. He junkets to Venezuela, Korea, Egypt, Nigeria, Kenya, Ghana, Tanzania, shamefacedly giving a speech...
...Cultural Situation of the American Writer." Bech is not, as a rule, well received. South American students noisily circulate leaflets to the audience during one of his talks. Bech glimpses a copy: "It showed himself, huge-nosed, as a vulture with striped and starred wings, perched on a tangle of multicolored little bodies; beneath the caricature ran the capitalized words INTELECTUAL REACCIONARIO, IMPERIALISTA, ENEMIGO DE LOS PUEBLOS." In Africa, Bech the imperialist discovers that the rate of cultural exchange is being alarmingly devalued: "The students found decadent and uninteresting Proust, Joyce, Shakespeare, Sartre, Hemingway-Hemingway, who had so enjoyed coming...