Bech is the opposite, though equally remote from the real Updike: he is smart, learned, artistic, cosmopolitan, alienated, Jewish, single and promiscuous. Bech is a blocked writer, and this calls for a spectacular feat of authorial empathy, since Updike himself can hardly let a month go by without blurting out a new novel, short-story collection, book of poems, essay hold-all. If Rabbit is an alter ego, then Bech is a super ego. Or maybe he is just an alter id. Like Bech: A Book, Bech is Back concerns itself with the subsidiaries of authorship: it is about what writers get up to when they aren’t writing. In Bech’s case, not writing consumes his every waking hour, and yet his reputation grows as his powers decline. The Superoil Corporation sends him to the Caribbean to sign 28,500 copies of his elderly second novel at $1.50 a pop. Here, Bech’s block reaches its cramped epiphany. ‘He gazed deep into the negative perfection to which his career had been brought. He could not even write his own name.’
Bech is pestered by autograph hounds, Ph.D. students, women’s institutes. He is swept off on cultural exchanges (chapter title: ‘Bech Third-Worlds It’), during which he is lionised, bored, traduced and menaced (chapter coda: ‘He vowed never to Third-World it again, unless someone asked him to’). Showing that mixture of awe, terror and gratitude characteristic of famous, middle-aged American novelists, he is regularly seduced by briskly adoring co-eds, models and cultural stewardesses. But Bech’s unfinished novel, Think Big, remains unfinished, even as his privileged gloom nears burnished completion.
At this point (half-way through the novel), Bech decides to marry his patient mistress, Bea, who has been hanging around ever since Bech: A Book (1970). Bea of course longs to be Bea Bech. An improbably bland divorcee with three kids, Bea wants to translate Bech to the Waspy suburbs of Westchester, to install him in a little hardwood study, and have him finish Think Big. Manhattan-based Bech has always refused to become a ‘one-man ghetto’ in yet another thriving outpost of bohunk America, but he submits to ‘his plump suburban softy … and vowed to marry her, to be safe’.
The prospect, for the reader, is enthralling. Bech, long mangled by citified cynicism, will now enter Rabbitland, with its safety, its squabbling, its marathon acquisitiveness. But the confrontation, when it happens, is a quiet one, and the book stays muted until Bech completes Think Big, escapes the idyll, and returns to Manhattan and his old ways. Rabbitland, quite rightly, is left to the Rabbits. It seems that the literary dystopia – even the gentle, suburban dystopia — is best evoked by the satisfied citizen, not by the brooding insurrectionary.
One’s disappointment, however, inevitably seeps through into the rest of the novel. The book feels patched together, invisibly mended, as if travel notes and a shelved novella have been busily revamped. (In particular, the harassments of Think Big have only a lackadaisical bearing on those of Bech is Back.) The new novel is inferior to its predecessor and both Bechs bear the signs of authorial thrift.
Something needs to be added, in a tone of baffled admiration, about Mr Updike’s prose. In common with all his post-Couples fiction, the new novel is ‘beautifully written’. That phrase has of course been devalued — it now means little more than freedom from gross infelicity; but Updike’s style is melodious, risky, detailed, funny and fresh. (An example, more or less at random: ‘He flopped into a canvas chair and kept crossing and recrossing his legs, which were so short he seemed to Bech to be twiddling his thumbs.’) This is so good,-you keep thinking; why isn’t it the best? Such prose is never easily achieved, and yet Updike produces an awful lot of the stuff … In the end, it reminds you of the best cinematography. Using talent and technique, lens and filter, the artist enjoys a weird infallibility, producing effects that are always rich, ravishing and suspiciously frictionless.
Observer 1982 and 1983
Joan Didion’s Style
Joan Didion is the poet of the Great Californian Emptiness. She sings of a land where it is easier to Dial-A-Devotion than to buy a book, where the freeway sniper, feels ‘real bad’ about picking off a family of five, where kids in High Kindergarten are given LSD and peyote by their parents, where young hustlers get lethally carried away while rolling elderly filmstars, where six-foot-two drag queens shop for fishnet bikinis, where a twenty-six-year-old woman can consign her five-year-old daughter to the centre divider of Interstate 5 (when her fingers were prised loose from the fence twelve hours later, the child pointed out that she had run after the car containing her family for ‘a long time’).