Updike at an Angle

Bech at Bay, by John Updike (Knopf, 241 pp., $23)

SOME writers write best at an angle from themselves—choosing sub- jects well-removed from their own life experience. This was one of the great rediscoveries of Modernism, however quickly it degenerated into a tic. John Updike still profits from it. His early Sixties succès de scandale, Couples, which depicted the copulating of what were not yet called yuppies (read: Updike and his friends), is long, earnest, embarrassing, and indigestible. The novels about Harry “Rabbit” Angstrom are far better and benefit from the fact that their hero is an average-lQ ex-basketball star who never left his pokey Pennsylvania home. While also a Pennsylvania native, Updike is smart, plays golf, and went to Harvard. But that single experience, shared by Updike and Rabbit, can exert a crippling gravitational pull on Rabbit’s story. Updike’s most sprightly work is enlivened by obvious fantasy, or pretense: two novels about the Devil (The Witches of Eastwick, Roger’s Version); one about an African dictator (The Coup); and three collections of short stories about a somewhat famous Jewish novelist, Henry Bech (Bech: A Book, Bech is Back, and now Bech at Bay).

About the Author

Richard Brookhiser

Historian Richard Brookhiser is a senior editor of National Review and a senior fellow at the National Review Institute.

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Bech at Bay, by John Updike (Knopf, 241 pp., $23)

SOME writers write best at an angle from themselves—choosing sub- jects well-removed from their own life experience. This was one of the great rediscoveries of Modernism, however quickly it degenerated into a tic. John Updike still profits from it. His early Sixties succès de scandale, Couples, which depicted the copulating of what were not yet called yuppies (read: Updike and his friends), is long, earnest, embarrassing, and indigestible. The novels about Harry “Rabbit” Angstrom are far better and benefit from the fact that their hero is an average-lQ ex-basketball star who never left his pokey Pennsylvania home. While also a Pennsylvania native, Updike is smart, plays golf, and went to Harvard. But that single experience, shared by Updike and Rabbit, can exert a crippling gravitational pull on Rabbit’s story. Updike’s most sprightly work is enlivened by obvious fantasy, or pretense: two novels about the Devil (The Witches of Eastwick, Roger’s Version); one about an African dictator (The Coup); and three collections of short stories about a somewhat famous Jewish novelist, Henry Bech (Bech: A Book, Bech is Back, and now Bech at Bay).