Volume 45, Number 18 · November 19, 1998
Bye-Bye Bech
By David Lodge
Bech at Bay: A Quasi-Novel
by John Updike
Knopf, 241 pp., $23.00
When writers write fiction about writers and writing they brace themselves, nervously or defiantly, for an adverse response from friends, colleagues, publishers, and, in due course, reviewers. They expect to be told that such a project is incestuous, narcissistic, self-indulgent, and of no interest to anyone but themselves. But when these fears have been overcome, and the work begins, a sense of unwonted ease and enjoyment is apt to ensue. The writer is focused on a subject he really knows intimately, and about which he really cares—more perhaps than he cares about any other: the business of writing, in every sense of the word 'business.' There is no need tediously to research, or strenuously to imagine, the lives of nonwriters—dealers or dentists or down-and-outs. The material is all there in his head, just waiting to be accessed.
Review, 4032 words
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