6/9/2023 0 Comments S. by John Updike![]() ![]() But Updike himself, in his very playful introduction to this collection, suggests there’s at least a bit of him in here. Then again, perhaps we get no more here than we get in any other book by any other author. Yet, in him we get a whiff of some of Updike’s own character. Bech has never married, and his behavior at 40 years of age is decidedly curmudgeon. This book is actually a collection of short pieces written during the 1960s and published principally in The New Yorker. In them we come to know Updike’s antithetical alter ego (or is it correct to say the anti-alter ego?), Henry Bech, a Jewish New Yorker who’s suffering from writer’s block. I’d heard good things about Bech, though, so I grabbed the first one: Bech: A Book. Perhaps fortuitously for me, the bookstore did not have any of the Rabbit books (strange, I know). I was in the bookstore a couple of months ago with a coupon for a free book, and I knew I wanted to use it to get to know Updike. ![]() I’ve read only a few of his short stories, and those long enough ago that I don’t remember them though I remember not understanding them. I’m not yet familiar with most of Updike’s work. I’m not sure how I would have felt about that, but this now gives me the opportunity to put up a sort of review in memoriam. This review was originally slated to post last Tuesday, the day John Updike died but before his death was announced. ![]()
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