A Writer's Life

By Paul Gray

This is John Updike's third go-round with "the semi-obscure American author" Henry Bech. Bech at Bay (Knopf; 241 pages; $23) displays the same mordantly comic look at the literary life that enlivened Bech: A Book (1970) and Bech Is Back (1982). The five stories that make up this new installment of the saga show an older and grumpier Bech still worrying about his long bouts of writer's block and finding ways of getting away from his desk whenever he can. On a State Department-sponsored junket to communist Prague in the mid-1980s, Bech meets dissident Czech writers and begins to envy them for living in a place where literature is considered important enough to suppress.

Back home in Manhattan he agrees to serve as president of "the Forty," an honorary association of artists whose aging members no longer find anyone younger worthy of filling vacancies left by the deceased. "If we don't ever manage to elect anybody," Bech lectures the group, "the institution will dwindle to nothing." Who would care? Not Bech's current mistress, Martina, who dismisses the Forty as "a bunch of mostly New York City has-beens electing themselves." Updike has one surprise for his beleaguered hero: the 1999 Nobel Prize for Literature. Anyone who thinks this stunning recognition will at long last make Bech at age 74 happy and fulfilled underestimates his funny and finely honed habits of suffering.

--By Paul Gray