More literary and amorous adventures enjoyed and endured by “the semi-obscure American author” previously celebrated in Bech: A Book (1970) and Bech is Back (1982) . Henry Bech—hands down, Updike’s happiest invention—might be called the temperamental obverse of his creator’s blue-collar everyman, “Rabbit” Angstrom (as well as an interesting analogue to Cynthia Ozick’s Ruth Puttermesser). A Jewish novelist of minimal achievement (seven books in forty years, including “the Kerowacky” Travel Light and his putative magnum opus The Chosen), he’s an “author of prose haiku” (passim); a failed lover, husband, and father; and—in the current incarnation—an aging celebrity wrestling with the demands of his undiminished libido and flickering literary fame. Updike surveys what ought to be Henry Bech’s declining years in five related stories (parts of which appeared, inevitably, in The New Yorker). “Bech in Czech” recounts a “cultural visit” to Prague during which the 60ish author is both aroused and chagrined by the vigorous energies his embattled host country exhibits. “Bech Pleads Guilty” takes him to L.A. and a lawsuit provoked by his derogatory magazine article about a Hollywood agent. And the concluding “Bech and the Bounty of Sweden” finds the elderly reprobate possessed of both an infant daughter and—to the horror of a scandalized literary establishment—the Nobel Prize. These three—thinly plotted “stories” enlivened by inspired noodling—are easily outmatched by their longer counterparts: a hilarious account of their antihero’s tenure heading a moribund society of artists (“Bech Presides”); and the even better (brilliantly titled) “Bech Noir”: a literally murderous expansion of Henry’s realization “that the literary world was a battlefield—mined with hatred, rimmed with snipers”—and that he’s mad as hell and doesn’t have to take it anymore. Updike unbound—at his most frolicsome and funniest. His best novel, “quasi” or not, in years.
Pub Date: Oct. 26, 1998
ISBN: 0-375-40368-X
Page Count: 272
Publisher: Knopf
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 1, 1998
The Brat Pack meets The Bacchae in this precious, way-too-long, and utterly unsuspenseful town-and-gown murder tale. A bunch of ever-so-mandarin college kids in a small Vermont school are the eager epigones of an aloof classics professor, and in their exclusivity and snobbishness and eagerness to please their teacher, they are moved to try to enact Dionysian frenzies in the woods. During the only one that actually comes off, a local farmer happens upon them—and they kill him. But the death isn't ruled a murder—and might never have been if one of the gang—a cadging sybarite named Bunny Corcoran—hadn't shown signs of cracking under the secret's weight. And so he too is dispatched. The narrator, a blank-slate Californian named Richard Pepen chronicles the coverup. But if you're thinking remorse-drama, conscience masque, or even semi-trashy who'll-break-first? page-turner, forget it: This is a straight gee-whiz, first-to-have-ever-noticed college novel—"Hampden College, as a body, was always strangely prone to hysteria. Whether from isolation, malice, or simple boredom, people there were far more credulous and excitable than educated people are generally thought to be, and this hermetic, overheated atmosphere made it a thriving black petri dish of melodrama and distortion." First-novelist Tartt goes muzzy when she has to describe human confrontations (the murder, or sex, or even the ping-ponging of fear), and is much more comfortable in transcribing aimless dorm-room paranoia or the TV shows that the malefactors anesthetize themselves with as fate ticks down. By telegraphing the murders, Tartt wants us to be continually horrified at these kids—while inviting us to semi-enjoy their manneristic fetishes and refined tastes. This ersatz-Fitzgerald mix of moralizing and mirror-looking (Jay McInerney shook and poured the shaker first) is very 80's—and in Tartt's strenuous version already seems dated, formulaic. Les Nerds du Mal—and about as deep (if not nearly as involving) as a TV movie.
Pub Date: Sept. 16, 1992
ISBN: 1400031702
Page Count: 592
Publisher: Knopf
Review Posted Online: May 19, 2010
Kirkus Reviews Issue: July 1, 1992
BOOK REVIEW
BOOK REVIEW
SEEN & HEARD
SEEN & HEARD
SEEN & HEARD
A modern day fable, with modern implications in a deceiving simplicity, by the author of Dickens. Dali and Others (Reynal & Hitchcock, p. 138), whose critical brilliance is well adapted to this type of satire. This tells of the revolt on a farm, against humans, when the pigs take over the intellectual superiority, training the horses, cows, sheep, etc., into acknowledging their greatness. The first hints come with the reading out of a pig who instigated the building of a windmill, so that the electric power would be theirs, the idea taken over by Napoleon who becomes topman with no maybes about it. Napoleon trains the young puppies to be his guards, dickers with humans, gradually instigates a reign of terror, and breaks the final commandment against any animal walking on two legs. The old faithful followers find themselves no better off for food and work than they were when man ruled them, learn their final disgrace when they see Napoleon and Squealer carousing with their enemies... A basic statement of the evils of dictatorship in that it not only corrupts the leaders, but deadens the intelligence and awareness of those led so that tyranny is inevitable. Mr. Orwell's animals exist in their own right, with a narrative as individual as it is apt in political parody.
Pub Date: Aug. 26, 1946
ISBN: 0452277507
Page Count: 114
Publisher: Harcourt, Brace
Review Posted Online: Nov. 2, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Aug. 1, 1946
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