Sylvia Brownrigg
BECH AT BAY: A QUASI-NOVEL by John Updike (Penguin)
`I’m a vanished man, a non-entity as far as mass readership goes,” John Updike was recently quoted as saying. The note of self-pity sounded in this exaggerated remark – Updike is still one of the most eminent of America’s senior writers, even if he hasn’t produced a recent masterpiece – could have been struck by another well- known American writer, who frets over his popularity with a dwindling reading public: Henry Bech.
Bech who, depending on your point of view, is either a writer full of “primitive energy” and “raw love of life” or “the embodiment of everything retrograde and unenlightened in pre-electronic American letters”; who, as he approaches 70, has to witness himself being ossified into an academic subject: “If he wasn’t assigned in a college seminar on post-war anti-realism, he wasn’t read.”
Bech may have fought his own battles against writer’s block, but has only ever been a fecund source for his prolific creator, John Updike, who brings the writer’s fans up to date with this third volume, Bech at Bay.
The book, as its subtitle suggests, is not really a novel: like previous Bech books it’s a collection of short stories about the anxious, restless writer. Bech is one of Updike’s more amicable alter egos:he allows Updike to exorcise (or express) his anxiety about being an unfashionable Wasp in an era when many of the great American novelists have been Jewish. Mortality now casts its shadow over the ageing Bech: as he watches colleagues fall around him, the question of posthumous reputation inevitably arises. And reputation has always been the sly and slippery subject of Updike’s Bech excursions.
It is the book’s penultimate story that draws the most attention to itself. Bech Noir allows Bech to wipe out his harshest critics. The usually mild author is inspired to murder by the “creamy satisfaction” he experiences one morning when reading the obituary of a loathsome reviewer who – Bech can recite from memory – once wrote, “Strive and squirm as he will, Bech will never, never be touched by the American sublime.”
It is a short step from this to Bech’s nudging another enemy to his death: one of the “Brits who were breeding like woodlice in the rotting log piles of the New York literary industry”, whose damning, lyrical prose might seem to bear a resemblance to that of The Guardian’s James Wood -who has rightfully come down hard on Updike for his chronic misogyny.
As Bech draws in the assistance of his lover Robin – Updike indulgently allows his anti-hero a mistress a third his age – the madcap caper becomes increasingly cartoonish: the two commit their final murder clothed in cape and mask.
The story may leave behind the quasi- realism of the earlier stories, and it has strains of a distinctive Updike meanness; but it also mines a rich vein of humour, most of which comes from the author’s penning of faux harshnesses about Bech: “his prose seems flimsy, the nowhere song of a nowhere man”.
The reader should be alert to the shades of self-consciousness in the book. Bech himself dismisses Updike as one of the “suburbanites living safe while art’s inner city disintegrated”. Updike has admitted he finds reviews “humiliating”, but, unlike Bech, he has a reputation for criticism almost equal to that for fiction.
And Updike cannot be unaware of his own youthful acts of critical cannibalism. He described JD Salinger as “dangerously convoluted and static” and said he considered Jack Kerouac’s On the Road a tricycle ride.
He sees both the integrity and the absurdity in the two mutually dependent endeavours of the writer-critic. How can he not, as the subject of Nicholson Baker’s brilliant and hilarious U and I? How can he not, as someone who recently delivered a speech called Should John Updike Be Awarded the Nobel Prize?
Updike obviously has his own share of writerly celebrations, degradations and anxieties; and if Bech is his way of dealing with them, so much the better for his many (not yet vanished) readers.