Bech Is Back

Bech Is Back By John Updike Knopf, 195 pp., $13.95 Seven years after a libidinous young man took a male bunny as the symbol of his newly established magazine, John Updike published a novel about a fellow named Rabbit whose attitude toward women was also governed by a puerile priapism. That Rabbit’s emotional immaturity was a reflection of his creator’s was not at first apparent. Not until the publication of a hymn to lechery called Couples did it become clear that Updike was the Hugh Hefner of American fiction. Small wonder, then, that three of the seven chapters in Updike’s latest novel, Bech Is Back, originally appeared in Playboy.

The long-awaited novel that middleaged author Henry Bech finally gets around to writing is bitterly characterized by his wife as a dirty book. We can only wonder what she would have thought of Bech Is Back. In chapter one, Bech takes as his muse and bed partner a slender-waisted, ample-hipped bisexual named Ellen whom he had first noticed while lecturing at the New School in New York. When this affair has run its carnal course he flies off to the Caribbean with his longstanding mistress, Norma Latchett, who will in due time become his sister-in-law. Bech’s global lecture tour in chapters two and three conceivably could have inspired his creator to make some interesting observations about art and architecture, for Updike once studied at the Ruskin School of Drawing and Fine Arts in Oxford, England, or about religion and politics, which presumably also interest him, judging by the fact that he lists himself in Who’s Who in America as a Congregationalist and a Democrat. Such observations on these subjects as Bech Is Back does contain, however, are as intellectually superficial as they are stylistically uninspired. In the imaginatively underdeveloped, sexually overheated world of Henry Bech, life begins and ends with the female body.

KL

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Kenneth S. Lynn

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Bech Is Back By John Updike Knopf, 195 pp., $13.95 Seven years after a libidinous young man took a male bunny as the symbol of his newly established magazine, John Updike published a novel about a fellow named Rabbit whose attitude toward women was also governed by a puerile priapism. That Rabbit’s emotional immaturity was a reflection of his creator’s was not at first apparent. Not until the publication of a hymn to lechery called Couples did it become clear that Updike was the Hugh Hefner of American fiction. Small wonder, then, that three of the seven chapters in Updike’s latest novel, Bech Is Back, originally appeared in Playboy.

The long-awaited novel that middleaged author Henry Bech finally gets around to writing is bitterly characterized by his wife as a dirty book. We can only wonder what she would have thought of Bech Is Back. In chapter one, Bech takes as his muse and bed partner a slender-waisted, ample-hipped bisexual named Ellen whom he had first noticed while lecturing at the New School in New York. When this affair has run its carnal course he flies off to the Caribbean with his longstanding mistress, Norma Latchett, who will in due time become his sister-in-law. Bech’s global lecture tour in chapters two and three conceivably could have inspired his creator to make some interesting observations about art and architecture, for Updike once studied at the Ruskin School of Drawing and Fine Arts in Oxford, England, or about religion and politics, which presumably also interest him, judging by the fact that he lists himself in Who’s Who in America as a Congregationalist and a Democrat. Such observations on these subjects as Bech Is Back does contain, however, are as intellectually superficial as they are stylistically uninspired. In the imaginatively underdeveloped, sexually overheated world of Henry Bech, life begins and ends with the female body.