Since tales of his exploits began appearing in The New
Yorker more than thirty years ago, Henry Bech, John
Updike's playfully irreverent alter-ego, has charmed readers
with his aesthetic dithering and his seemingly inexhaustible
libido. The Bech stories—collected in one volume for the
first time, and featuring a final, series-capping story,
"His Oeuvre"—cast an affectionate eye on the famously
unproductive Jewish-American writer, offering up a stream of
wit, whimsy, and lyric pungency unmatched in American
letters.
From his birth in 1923 to his belated
paternity and public apotheosis as a spry septuagenarian in
1999, Bech plugs away, globetrotting in the company of
foreign dignitaries one day and schlepping in tattered
tweeds on the college lecture circuit the next. By turns
cynical and naïve, wry and avuncular, and always amorous, he
is Updike’s most endearing confection—a Lothario, a
curmudgeon, and a winsome literary icon all in one. A
perfect forum for Updike's limber prose, The Complete
Henry Bech is an arch portrait of the literary life in
America from an incomparable American writer.
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