Bech: A Book - A Book

Zusatztext “[John] Updike’s most delightful book . . . Truly entertaining.”— Harper’s   “Updike has written his most appealing [work].”— The Boston Sunday Globe   “ Bech succeeds marvelously. . . . One falls into the book and through it and out the other side of it as effortlessly as one might slide through a polished aluminum table in a funhouse. . . . A deft poke at what it means to be a writer in America.”— The New York Times Informationen zum Autor John Updike Klappentext The Jewish American novelist Henry Bech-procrastinating! libidinous! and tart-tongued! his reputation growing while his powers decline-made his first appearance in 1965! in John Updike's "The Bulgarian Poetess." That story won the O. Henry First Prize! and it and the six Bech adventures that followed make up this collection. "Bech is the writer in me!" Updike once said! "creaking but lusty! battered but undiscourageable! fed on the blood of ink and the bread of white paper." As he trots the globe! promotes himself! and lurches from one woman's bed to another's! Bech views life with a blend of wonder and cynicism that will make followers of the lit-biz smile with delight and wince in recognition. Students (not unlike yourselves) compelled to buy paper­back copies of his novels—notably the first, Travel Light, though there has lately been some academic interest in his more surreal and “existential” and perhaps even “anarchist” second novel, Brother Pig—or encountering some essay from When the Saints in a shiny heavy anthology of mid-­century literature costing $12.50, imagine that Henry Bech, like thousands less famous than he, is rich. He is not. The paperback rights to Travel Light were sold by his publisher outright for two thousand dollars, of which the publisher kept one thousand and Bech’s agent one hundred (10% of 50%). To be fair, the publisher had had to remainder a third of the modest hard-­cover printing and, when Travel Light was enjoying its vogue as the post-­Golding pre-­Tolkien fad of college undergraduates, would amusingly tell on himself the story of Bech’s given-­away rights, at sales meetings upstairs in “21.” As to anthologies—the average permissions fee, when it arrives at Bech’s mailbox, has been eroded to $64.73, or some such suspiciously odd sum, which barely covers the cost of a restaurant meal with his mistress and a medium wine. Though Bech, and his too numerous interviewers, have made a quixotic virtue of his continuing to live for twenty years in a grim if roomy Riverside Drive apartment building (the mailbox, students should know, where his pitifully nibbled checks arrive has been well scarred by floating urban wrath, and his last name has been so often ballpointed by playful lobby-­loiterers into a somewhat assonant verb that Bech has left the name plate space blank and depends upon the clairvoyance of mailmen), he in truth lives there because he cannot afford to leave. He was rich just once in his life, and that was in Russia, in 1964, a thaw or so ago. Russia, in those days, like everywhere else, was a slightly more innocent place. Khrushchev, freshly deposed, had left an atmosphere, almost comical, of warmth, of a certain fitful openness, of inscrutable experiment and oblique possibility. There seemed no overweening reason why Russia and America, those lovable paranoid giants, could not happily share a globe so big and blue; there certainly seemed no reason why Henry Bech, the recherché but amiable novelist, artistically blocked but socially fluent, should not be flown into Moscow at the expense of our State Department for a month of that mostly imaginary activity termed “cultural exchange.” Entering the Aeroflot plane at Le Bourget, Bech thought it smelled like his uncles’ backrooms in Williamsburg, of swaddled body heat and proximate potatoes, boiling. The impression lingered all month; Russia seemed Jewish to him, and of course...

Product details

• Authors: John Updike
• Publisher: Random House USA
• Languages: English
• Product format: Paperback / Softback
• Released: 25.08.1998
• EAN: 9780449004524
• ISBN: 978-0-449-00452-4
• No. of pages: 192
• Dimensions: 138 mm x 209 mm x 13 mm
• Series: Bech; Bech
• Subjects: Education and learning > Readings/interpretations/reading notes > English; Fiction > Narrative literature