It is just under a year since the publication of John Updike's Toward the End of Time, a performance which matches Roger's Version (1986) and Rabbit at Rest (1991), and one which was recognised almost immediately as an unexpectedly profound, surprisingly moving elegy. During his forty-year career Updike has produced an extraordinary amount of fiction without ever revealing the slightest tremor of desperation. Yet relaxed and urbane as his narrative tone invariably is, driven he must be. No writer could attempt to match Updike's effortless and relentless productivity without ending up in either a hospital or a madhouse.
Having written so much, he is - in common with William Trevor - too easy to take for granted. Moreover, Updike has also paid the penalty of having chosen to concentrate on themes such as middle-class adultery and urban survival, hardly the most exalted of subjects, but then Updike has never been pretentious - ordinary confusion, mainly sexual and emotional, continues to intrigue him - as does serial fiction, as the Rabbit books and the Bech and Maples stories suggest.
His latest book, Bech at Bay (Hamish Hamilton, £16.99 in UK), is not a major work - he has even subtitled it "a quasinovel" - but it is hilarious. Updike's Harry Bech is Jewish, a bit frantic, has messy relationships yet remains preoccupied with sex, and is a shambling literary conman, a one-hit wonder who suffers from ongoing writer's block, yet manages to secure lecture tours and author appearances.
In Bech: A Book (1970), consisting of seven Bech stories, five of which had first appeared in the New Yorker from 1965 inwards, Updike introduced his variation of the Jewish American novelist, a species diversely personified by Bellow, Mailer, Malamud, Roth, Heller, and so on. Bech is presented as a "fortyish young man . . . with thinning curly hair and melancholy Jewish nose, the author of one good book and three others, the good one having come first". Bech, at best ambivalent about his Jewishness, has already recognised the ironies of fame: "His reputation had grown while his powers declined. As he felt himself sink, in his fiction, deeper and deeper into eclectic sexuality and bravura narcissism . . . he was more and more hounded by homage, by flat-footed exegetes, by arrogantly worshipful undergraduates who had hitchhiked a thousand miles to touch his hand, by querulous translators, by election to honorary societies, by invitations to lecture, to `speak', to `read', to participate in symposia trumped up by ambitious girlie magazines in shameless conjunction with venerable universities."
That first volume of Bech adventures, notable for some of Updike's funniest dialogue, confirmed that Updike the Wasp from Shillington, Pennsylvania, was clearly unintimidated by one of the most enduring literary myths in US literature, that of the angst-ridden Jewish American writer. But for all his knowingness, Updike has never been vicious, and he has had immense fun with the episodic adventures of Bech, particularly in his hilarious and wonderfully well observed travels through Eastern Europe.
Just when it seemed that Bech had faded from memory following the final story, "Bech Enters Heaven", Updike revived his self-described "moderately well-known American Jewish writer" with a further seven stories published collectively as Bech Is Back in 1983. Again in that book the emphasis is on travel. "Henry Bech, the author" is now married and "in his middle years"; he has "all but ceased to write" while "his books continued, as if ironically, to live, to cast shuddering shadows toward the centre of his life, where that thing called his reputation cowered".
Comic he may be, but Bech is essentially embarrassed by himself and most everyone else he meets. For all the self-absorption, even the wildest comedy is underlined by the conflicts of illusion and reality. In this new book, Updike's Bech remains consistently random. The five self-contained, uneven, stories certainly show Updike again having fun; he is characteristically light-footed and observant, and the one-liners are in abundance.
The opening piece has the now "semi-obscure American author" back in Europe. In the first story Bech visits Kafka's grave in preperestroika and anti-semitic Prague. For a Jew to move through postwar Europe, observes Bech, "is to move through hordes of ghosts, vast animated crowds that, since 1945, are not there, not there at all - up in smoke. The feathery touch of the mysteriously absent is felt on all sides." The observations are blackly humorous and yet humane. Updike the gentile is entering dangerous territory by choosing to write about the Holocaust, yet he does so adroitly, albeit, in one instance, riskily: "Hitler. To come to Europe is somehow to pay him a visit. He was becoming a myth, like the Golem."
Elsewhere the humour is good-naturedly barbed, with the weary, wary writer at the mercy of respectfully earnest translators who do not really understand his work, and grappling with the pretensions and lack of generosity of literary societies and writers' unions. In "Bech Noir", the funniest story, a Jacobean tragedy of revenge against reviewers, Bech becomes a serial killer.
The reader takes leave of Bech and Updike wondering not for the first time at the skills of this writer who can do anything. It is fitting that in the final piece, the hugely undeserving Bech wins the Nobel Prize. Should the Stockholm Committee be interested in de-politicising the award, why not give it to an agenda-free writer who loves language, whose prose has consistently celebrated the beauties of the ordinary and above all whose art deals in stories?
