Volume 29, Number 18 · November 18, 1982
Jew d'Esprit
By Josh Rubins
Bech Is Back
by John Updike
Knopf, 195 pp., $13.95
The return of Henry Bech was, one might think, something less than inevitable. After all, when, 'with his thinning curly hair and melancholy Jewish nose,' Bech first surfaced in a short story in the mid-1960s, the American Jewish Novel was approaching its heyday as a generic cultural commodity. In 1965 Herzog concluded a two-year stay near the top of the bestseller lists. By 1970, when seven Bech stories appeared together (with addenda) as Bech: A Book, 'Portnoy' was peaking—as a household name, as a nightclub punch-line; Salinger's silence boomed then too, almost as loudly as Mailer's word factory. In short, a fictional composite of the working American Jewish Novelist must have seemed like a good idea at the time—especially since the novelists themselves, however feverishly personal their alter egos, were still avoiding self-portraiture of the more transparently autobiographical kind.
Review, 2303 words
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