Word: beches
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...John Updike at 50, Bech tops off a very good year...
...Rabbit is rich. Bech is back. Updike is ubiquitous...
...Knopf, Inc., has released a handsome new edition of the author's first book, a collection of poems called The Carpentered Hen (1958). Many writers would be content to rest, at least for a beat, on such laurels. Not Updike. This month will witness the publication of Bech Is Back (Knopf; $13.95), a series of seven related stories that amount to his 26th volume. This figure does not include Updike's four books for children, which sometimes tug at the dust jackets of their elders and ask to be let into the canon. And No. 27, a thick...
Updike had his turn in Bech: A Book, a satire about literary politics and pretensions. At the same time he acceded to the practical need for bestselling popularity with Couples and prepared to meet relevance. He did, in 1971, by slipping a black-power radical into the pages of Rabbit Redux. He was not alone. Saul Bellow and even the reticent Bernard Malamud felt compelled to explore in fiction their feelings about those other, threatening Americans...
...couple of pieces in Museums seem to have been included to show the author's versatility. One is a whimsy about a group of one-celled pond-water creatures attending a cocktail party. Thurber could do this sort of thing well. Updike can't; except for Bech, a Book, his humor rarely breaks loose from cleverness. For the rest, there is a series of short stories about one of Updike's condescended-to suburban couples, called (smugly) the Maples. The first is very good indeed. It concerns Dick Maple's wobbly, not very creditable reactions when...