John Updike Bech Is Back.
Knopf, 165 pages, 13.95

Henry Bech is a celebrated, blocked American-Jewish novelist and the subject of two John Updike short-story collections, Bech: A Book (1970) and now Bech Is Back. Both volumes are satirical portraits of American literary life, and because that life has undergone drastic alteration since the 1960s Bech Is Back is not simply a sequel to Bech: A Book. In fact, the new work differs in surprising and often unsettling ways from its predecessor, and manages to tell us a great deal about Updike himself.

Bech: A Book begins with a letter “written” to Updike by the eponymous protagonist; Updike has apparently asked his character for a blessing on the book’s publication. Bech evaluates Updike’s performance as follows: “At first blush, . . . I sound like some gentlemanly Norman Mailer; then that . . . glimpse of silver hair glints more of gallant, glamorous Bellow, the King of the Leprechauns. . . . My childhood seems out of Alex Portnoy and my ancestral past out of LB. Singer. I get a whiff of Malamud . . . and am I paranoid to feel my ‘block’ an ignoble version of the more or less noble renunciations of H. Roth, D. Fuchs, and J. Salinger?” Thus Updike makes it clear from the very first page that Bech is not merely an American-Jewish novelist, but the American-Jewish novelist, a distillation and condensation of those writers who had dominated American