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Type of bind: Hardcover
Dewey Decimal Number: 813.54
EAN num: 9780375411762
ISBN number: 0375411763
Label: Everyman's Library
Manufacturer: Everyman's Library
Quantity: 1
Page Count: 544
Printing Date: March 27, 2001
Publishing house: Everyman's Library
Release Date: March 27, 2001
Sale Popularity Level: 766775
Studio: Everyman's Library
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Product Description:
Since tales of his exploits began appearing in The New Yorker more than thirty years ago, Henry Bech, John Updike's playfully irreverent alter-ego, has charmed readers with his aesthetic dithering and his seemingly inexhaustible libido. The Bech stories—collected in one volume for the very first time, and featuring a final, series-capping story, 'His Oeuvre'—cast an affectionate eye on the famously unproductive Jewish-American writer, offering up a stream of wit, whimsy, and lyric pungency unmatched in American letters.
From his birth in 1923 to his belated paternity and public apotheosis as a spry septuagenarian in 1999, Bech plugs away, globetrotting in the company of foreign dignitaries one day and schlepping in tattered tweeds on the college lecture circuit the next. By turns cynical and naïve, wry and avuncular, and always amorous, he is Updike’s most endearing confection—a Lothario, a curmudgeon, and a winsome literary icon all in one. A perfect forum for Updike's limber prose, The Complete Henry Bech is an arch portrait of the literary life in America from an incomparable American writer.
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Rated by buyers 
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Plenty of much better writers than me have written about the literary merits of John Updike's fiction, so I'm not going to even endeavor that here, nor do I think it necessary to offer a synopsis. Many years ago I read "Bech: A Book," and "Bech is Back" and found them quite amusing , and I wanted to read the last couple of works in this series. I find with all anthologies that the type is a bit small, but it quite crisp, and seems to pretty newly composited, (unlike say their version of "Bleak House" which is clearly old,) and the pages, although thin, are not of parchment-like thinness of the valuable yet punishing "American Library."
Rated by buyers -
Henry Bech, a Jewish writer who has been unproductive for well over a decade, finds himself continually offered free trips to obscure Eastern European countries. Academics from minor American universities call to offer him accommodation in return for a trip around the lecture circuit. Magazines and newspapers publish, every now and again, short articles entitled 'Whatever happened to Henry Bech?'. Once an up and coming novelist and now just an author who doesn't write, Bech lives the meaningless jet-set life of the author who has attained distinguished writer status simply by virtue of not having written a word in years. For John Updike, protestant where Bech is Jewish, productive where Bech is silent, this 'alter-ego' allows him to explore, with satire, wit and often, tedium, the celebrity life an author sometimes finds himself living, without ever really knowing how it all happened.
'The Complete Henry Bech' published by Penguin - and more on that later - contains two novellas and a short story. Bech: A Book is primarily concerned with Bech's adventures around the world, which essentially gives Updike an excuse to mention that countries major writers and to make allusions to them throughout the text. Bech is Back is the most entertaining of the trio and deals, in part, with Bech finally publishing after fifteen years silence, his often-referred to but never really worked out novel, Think Big. In between, he is married, divorces, and has plenty of literary discussions with young female editors, typists, fans, reviewers - all of whom seem remarkably enamoured with the author. Finally, there is Bech in Czech, a very short story which returns to the main conceit of Bech: A Book which, by now, has become somewhat unnecessary to the needs of the character. Rather than continuing to reveal the comic adventures of the novelist, Updike trots Bech around Czech, then ends the story. Certainly the weakest of the three.
What this collection does have going for it is the character of Bech. Like Harry Angstrom from Updike's remarkable Rabbit series, Bech has an active internal life, and is capable of describing the world around him in a way that, when it works, speaks of poetry, and when it does not, devolves into yet another comparison to sex, or sex organs - female, usually. Bech is much more literary than Harry, and refers either by name and title to other author's works - Roth, Mailer, Bellow, Salinger, Lewis, Dreiser, Vidal. These references work because Bech is an author, because he is supposed to know about writers, but a lot of the drug and women scenes ring with a hollow tone, because we have seen them elsewhere by Updike, and they were better. Bech, when he sticks to his strengths - parodying awards ceremonies, the reputation of an author, declining literary stardom, rising literary stardom, reviewers, editors, star-struck fans, greedy fans, nonchalant socialites, publishing conglomerates - works remarkably well, because the reader can't help but be aware that Updike, who himself has won many awards and has been a writer for his entire adult life, knows enough about the process and the fakery to be able to satirise with the honesty of information and sharpness of intent to really take a bite.
Some scenes are very funny indeed. For his entire career, Bech has had an admirer, Federbusch, who has tirelessly stayed by his author, collecting every edition that comes out in every language, and posting, with reply paid envelopes, to Henry Bech to sign. Bech is touched by this, so touched that when he is in the neighborhood - Cedar Meadow, Pennsylvania - he decides to pay his fan a visit. To his horror, he finds that his books are not in fact proudly displayed on Federbusch's bookshelf but instead, 'The books were not erect in rows but stacked on their sides like lumber, like dubious ingots, in this lightless closet along with - oh, the treachery! - similarly exhaustive, tightly packed, and beautifully unread collections of Roth, Mailer, Barth, Capote...' Poor Bech learns the hard way that fans cannot always be trusted, that the right reader may never be found. Later Bech is informed that a new edition of his books are to be printed by 'Superbooks', which is owned by a vast conglomerate. He is to be paid $1.50 for every piece of paper he signs for the company, for a total of twenty-eight thousand five hundred pieces of high-rag-content paper. He is flown to the Caribbean along with his wife - the company recommends a puller for maximum efficiency signing - and they spend two weeks signing and signing and signing. Bech's obsession with his own signature provides a lot of laughs, and shows again the strength of a writer parodying writers.
But a lot of the work comes tumbling down. When Updike sticks to writers, he is untouchable with Bech's touchy, arrogant, sensitive, misunderstood, concerned, literary, anxious, aged character packing all the punches ... Read More
Rated by buyers -
Updike's Jewish alter ego is an extension of his imagination and identity. He recognizes and absorbs the ' identity ' of his major rivals of the time Bellow and Roth and shows he also can be them and be that. But a projection however clever does not in this case have the power of what is closer to him, with him. And there is greater authenticity and strength in the 'Rabbit Books'.
I have I think also an objection which only a minority of readers will share. Bech is a pasteboard Jew who has no real deep Jewish knowledge or identity. This does not mean characters like him do not exist, or Updike had no right to create him. It does mean that those of us looking for some depth when they meet a Jewish intellectual or cultural figure are quite disappointed.
In any case it is clear that for Updike Bech is just a sideshow, one of the many that constitute parts of the complex identity of this very remarkable American writer.
Rated by buyers 
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I've always considered Updike much more valuable for his superlative book reviews than for his, to my mind, more-sizzle-than-steak fiction. (If you dig past the nostalgic plethora of period detail in the Rabbit books, there really isn't a great deal there.) But 20 years after accidentally discovering Henry Bech on the shelves of the public library (just as Updike has said he likes to imagine people encountering his books), his hapless exploits with women and the Muse continue to provide me with unfailing pleasure. It's a fine service to American literature to have them all - including the previously uncollected story "His Oeuvre", one of the best - gathered together between one set of hardcovers.
There is however, I'm sad to say, a big ugly boil on the butt of this otherwise handsome volume: the semi-infamous "Bech Noir", in which Updike, seemingly grown disgusted with the continuing durability of his character, jerks him through a sour ludicrous pantomime - the sheer awfulness of which makes it almost impossible to look at him the same way again. .... It's as if Frank L. Baum, around the fourth or fifth Oz book, had Dorothy move to Los Angeles where she became a crack whore. After that, the valedictory tale in which Bech most implausibly receives the Nobel Prize comes across as simply another gesture of contempt - whether towards the Swedish Academy, for honoring the even-less-qualified Toni Morrison rather than himself, or towards the reader, I can't say. All I can tell you - strange advice, I know - is to skip those two stories if you haven't been contaminated by them already.
Rated by buyers -
Henry Bech is John Updike's playfully irreverent alter ego and has charmed readers with aesthetic dithering and a seemingly inexhaustible libido. Now all of Updike's Henry Bech stories have been compiled in one volume, including the final, series-capping story "His Oeuvre". This outstanding Everyman's Library edition of The Complete Henry Bech is "must" reading for all John Updike fans and a very highly recommended addition to school and community library literary collections.
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