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Going South |
| Section: BOOK WORLD / REVIEWS |
| Author: Bernard Rodgers |
| Publication:
The World & I Online |
| Issue Date: 2/1/1999 |
| Size: 2,729 Words, 16,394 Characters |
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BECH AT BAY
A Quasi-novel
John Updike
New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1998
241 pp., $23.00
John Updike called his first collection of episodes in the life of Henry Bech "a book," referred to his second as "a semi-novel," has subtitled his third "a quasi-novel," and has labeled the audiobook made up of excerpts from the series Bech at Bay and Before "Three Bech Novels." However you describe the individual volumes--and they've given this reader so much pleasure over the past three decades that Updike can call them whatever he likes as far as I'm concerned--there is no doubt that the Bech trilogy includes some of the finest and funniest writing of Updike's career.
If the farewell gesture in the final paragraph of Bech at Bay means that with this book Updike is saying good-bye to Henry Bech as he earlier said good-bye to Richard and Joan Maple in Too Far to Go and Rabbit Angstrom in Rabbit at Rest, we can only respond with a sigh of regret and a grateful backward glance.
Looking back
Counting the five books that he's written for children, John Updike has now published fifty books over the past forty years. Fifty. Beginning with the poetry collection The Carpentered Hen, published in 1958, he has written novels, stories, poems, essays, reviews, and art criticism, creating a body of work that has indisputably established him as our foremost man of letters. No major writer in the history of American literature has even come close to this record of productivity, and very few have ranged as widely or written as many books worthy of a serious reader's attention.
This productivity is somethin...
Read Full Article
...ech said at the conclusion of his foreword, "I never--unlike retired light-verse writers--make puns. But ... I don't suppose your publishing this little jeu of a book will do either of us drastic harm." To the many readers for whom the 656 pages of the completed trilogy are a special part of the long shelf of Updike's books, this turns out to have been one of Henry Bech's few understatements.
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Publication Details
(The World & I Online) |
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The World & I Online is a
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Originally published monthly in print as The World & I, our site
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