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Zusatztext “Bech is back all right! but only after paying a large and painful price. . . . Updike reflects in these pages on the odd and unsettling ways in which art can impinge upon life! the ways in which a book acquires a life of its own that seems wholly unrelated to that of the person who created it! the ways in which celebrity separates those upon whom it is bestowed from reality.”— The Washington Post “Mr. Updike finds full scope for his gifts here: for sly and cheerfully malicious pensées on contemporary literary life; for busy observations on human behavior.” —The New Yorker “[Updike] at the top of his craft.”— Time Informationen zum Autor John Updike was born in Shillington, Pennsylvania, in 1932. He graduated from Harvard College in 1954 and spent a year in Oxford, England, at the Ruskin School of Drawing and Fine Art. From 1955 to 1957 he was a member of the staff of The New Yorker . His novels have won the Pulitzer Prize, the National Book Award, the National Book Critics Circle Award, the Rosenthal Foundation Award, and the William Dean Howells Medal. In 2007 he received the Gold Medal for Fiction from the American Academy of Arts and Letters. John Updike died in January 2009. Klappentext In this follow-up to Bech: A Book, Henry Bech, the priapic, peripatetic, and unproductive Jewish American novelist, returns with seven more chapters from his mock-heroic life. He turns fifty in a confusing blend of civic and erotic circumstances while publicizing himself in Australia and Canada. He marries a shiksa and travels with her to Israel, where she falls in love with the land, and to Scotland, where he does. And-sweating buckets! thinking big! minting miracles!-he writes an ingeniously tawdry bestseller. Bech's aesthetic and moral embarrassments reveal acid truths about both his trade and our times.chapter one three illuminations in the life of an american author Though Henry Bech, the author, in his middle years had all but ceased to write, his books continued, as if ironically, to exist, to cast shuddering shadows toward the center of his life, where that thing called his reputation cowered. To have once imagined and composed fiction, it seemed, laid him under an indelible curse of unreality. The phone rang in the middle of the night and it was a kid on a beer trip wanting to argue about the ambivalent attitude toward Jewishness expressed (his professor felt) in Brother Pig. “Embrace your ethnicity, man,” Bech was advised. He hung up, tried to estimate the hour from the yellowness of the Manhattan night sky, and as the yellow turned to dawn’s pearl gray succumbed to the petulant embrace of interrupted sleep. Next morning, he looked to himself, in the bathroom mirror, markedly reduced. His once leonine head, and the frizzing hair expressive of cerebral energy, and the jowls testimonial to companionable bourbon taken in midnight discourse with Philip Rahv were all being whittled by time, its relentless wizening. The phone rang and it was a distant dean, suddenly a buddy, inviting him to become a commencement speaker in Kansas. “Let me be brutally frank,” the dean said in his square-shouldered voice. “The seniors’ committee voted you in unanimously, once Ken Kesey turned us down. Well, there was one girl who had to be talked around. But it turned out she had never read your stuff, just Kate Millett’s condemnation of the rape bits in Travel Light. We gave her an old copy of When the Saints, and now she’s your staunchest fan. Not to put any unfair pressure on, but you don’t want to break that girl’s heart. Or do you?” “I do,” Bech solemnly affirmed. But since the dean denied him the passing grade of a laugh, the author had to babble on, digging himself deeper into the bottomless apology his unproductive life had become. He heard himself, unreally, consenting. The date was months away, and World War III mi...
