Bech at Bay - Couverture souple

       BECH HAD A NEW SIDEKICK. Her monicker was Robin. Rachel
          "Robin" Teagarten. Twenty-six, post-Jewish, frizzy big hair, figure on the
          short and solid side. She interfaced for him with an IBM PS/1 his
          publisher had talked him into buying. She set up the defaults, rearranged
          the icons, programmed the style formats, accessed the ANSI character
          sets--Bech was a stickler for foreign accents. When he answered a letter,
          she typed it for him from dictation. When he took a creative leap, she
          deciphered his handwriting and turned it into digitized code. Neither
          happened very often. Bech was of the Ernest Hemingway
          save-your-juices school. To fill the time, he and Robin slept together. He
          was seventy-four, but they worked with that. Seventy-four plus
          twenty-six was one hundred; divided by two, that was fifty, the prime of
          life. The energy of youth plus the wisdom of age. A team. A duo.

              They were in his snug aerie on Crosby Street. He was reading the
          Times at breakfast: caffeineless Folgers, calcium-reinforced D'Agostino
          orange juice, poppy-seed bagel lightly toasted. The crumbs and poppy
          seeds had scattered over the newspaper and into his lap but you don't
          get something for nothing, not on this hard planer. Bech announced to
          Robin, "Hey, Lucas Mishner is dead."

              A creamy satisfaction--the finest quality, made extra easy to spread by
          the toasty warmth--thickly covered his heart.

              "Who's Lucas Mishner?" Robin asked. She was deep in the D
          section--Business Day. She was a practical-minded broad with no
          experience of culture prior to 1975.

              "Once-powerful critic," Bech told her, biting off his phrases. "Late
          Partisan Review school. Used to condescend to appear in the Trib
          Book Review, when the Trib was still alive on this side of the Atlantic.
          Despised my stuff. Called it `superficially energetic but lacking in the true
          American fiber, the grit, the wrestle.' That's him talking, not me. The grit,
          the wrestle. Sanctimonious bastard. When The Chosen came out in '63,
          he wrote, `Strive and squirm as he will, Bech will never, never be
          touched by the American sublime.' The simple, smug, know-it-all son of
          a bitch. You know what his idea of the real stuff was? James Jones.
          James Jones and James Gould Cozzens."

              There Mishner's face was, in the Times, twenty years younger, with a
          fuzzy little rosebud smirk and a pathetic slicked-down comb-over like
          limp Venetian blinds throwing a shadow across the dome of his head.
          The thought of him dead filled Bech with creamy ease. He told Robin,
          "Lived way the hell up in Connecticut. Three wives, no flowers. Hadn't
          published for years. The rumor in the industry was he was gaga with
          alcoholic dementia."

              "You seem happy."

              "Very."

              "Why? You say he had stopped being a critic anyway."

              "Not in my head. He tried to hurt me. He did hurt me. Vengeance is
          mine."

              "Who said that?"

              "The Lord. In the Bible. Wake up, Robin."

              "I thought it didn't sound like you," she admitted. "Stop hogging the
          Arts section. Let's see what's playing in the Village. I feel like a movie
          tonight."

              "I'm not reading the Arts section."

              "But it's under what you are reading."

              "I was going to get to it."

              "That's what I call hogging. Pass it over."

              He passed it over, with a pattering of poppy seeds on the
          polyurethaned teak dining table Robin had installed. For years he and his
          female guests had eaten at a low glass coffee table farther forward in the
          loft. The sun slanting in had been pretty, but eating all doubled up had
          been bad for their internal organs. Robin had got him to take vitamins,
          too, and the calcium-reinforced o.j. She thought it would straighten his
          spine. He was in his best shape in years. She had got him doing sit-ups
          and push-ups. He was hard and quick, for a man who'd had his Biblical
          three score and ten. He was ready for action. He liked the tone of his
          own body. He liked the cut of Robin's smooth broad jaw across the teak
          table. Her healthy big hair, her pushy plump lips, her little flattened nose.
          "One down," he told her, mysteriously.

              But she was reading the Arts section, the B section, and didn't hear.
          "Con Air, Face/Off," she read. This was the summer of 1997. "Air
          Force One, Men in Black. They're all violent. Disgusting."

              "Why are you afraid of a little violence?" he asked her. "Violence is
          our poetry now, now that sex has become fatally tainted."

              "Or Contact," Robin said. "From the reviews it's all about how the
          universe secretly loves us."

              "That'll be the day," snarled Bech. Though in fact the juices surging
          inside him bore a passing resemblance to those of love. Mishner dead put
        ...

Henry Bech, the moderately well known Jewish-American writer who served as the hero of John Updike's previous Bech: A Book (1970) and Bech Is Back (1982), has become older but scarcely wiser. In these five new chapters from his life, he is still at bay, pursued by the hounds of desire and anxiety, of unbridled criticism and publicity in a literary world ever more cheerfully crass. He fights intimations of annihilation in still-Communist Czechoslovakia, while promiscuously consorting with dissidents, apparatchiks, and Midwestern Republicans. Next, he succumbs to the temptations of power by accepting the presidency of a quaint and cosseted honorary body patterned on the Académie Française. Then, the reader finds him on trial in California and on a criminal rampage in a gothic Gotham, abetted by a nubile sidekick called Robin. Lastly, our septuagenarian veteran of the literary wars is rewarded with a coveted medal, stunning him into a well-deserved silence. It's not easy being Henry Bech in the post-Gutenbergian world, but somebody has to do it, and he brings to the task an indomitable mixture of grit and ennui.