John Updike sampled what Manhattan’s literary life had to offer, then turned his back on it definitively and, seemingly, without regrets. In 1957, after a two-year stint on the staff of The New Yorker, he defected to Massachusetts, never to return. He has therefore kept relatively clear of what he only half-facetiously describes as “the narrow precincts of the Manhattan intelligentsia, a site saturated in poisonous envy and reflexive intolerance and basic impotence.” His absence from the scene certainly doesn’t seem to have done his career, his health, or his spirits any harm.

But as imaginative territory, literary Manhattan has proved irresistible to Updike the satirist, and he has done it full justice and then some in his volumes of stories concerning the doings of New York novelist Henry Bech. In Bech at Bay, the newest and, apparently, the last volume in the series, the elderly Bech—seventy-six and accepting the Nobel Prize at the volume’s close—is still very much a child of his time and his city.¹

Updike has gone to pains to make Bech as different as possible from himself. Bech is Jewish; he is a native New Yorker, as opposed to the Pennsylvanian Updike; he was born, as near as I can figure, in 1923, almost a decade before his creator, and therefore took part in the Second World War. His creative output, too, is markedly different from Updike’s. Plagued by a chronic and most un-Updikean writer’s block, Bech has produced over