Volume 15, Number 7 · October 22, 1970
Keeping Up with Updike
By Jack Richardson
Bech: A Book
by John Updike
Knopf, 206 pp., $5.95
How can a contemporary novelist confront experience? How, knowing that art has worn out so many of the details of life, can one still fix a narrative of a novel's length into a world made up of 'things' and 'characters'? How can one make the selection of events or the color of an eye without arousing disquieting feelings about old-fashioned literary calculation? Or again, how to make those eyes and the events they witness not seem examples of a self-indulgent modernism or a coy eccentricity? When excess is tolerated, indeed sought after, by the public and its critics, how can one keep those first tentative ideas for a novel from serving an easy, étonne-moi aesthetic?
Review, 2501 words
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