On this day in 1932, Pulitzer Prize-winning author John Updike was born in the small town of Shillington, Pennsylvania. “…Bech could only say, “Kate, you’ve never read my books. They’re all about women.” “Yes,” she said, “but coldly observed. As if extraterrestrial life.”” -- John Updike Since tales of his exploits began appearing in The New Yorker more than thirty years ago, Henry Bech, John Updikes 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 Updikes limber prose, The Complete Henry Bech is an arch portrait of the literary life in America from an incomparable American writer.
Posted on: Tue, 18 Mar 2014 17:05:00 +0000
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