Alaska Employment Law

John Updike died not so long ago.  I’ve read the four original Rabbit novels twice, as well as a number of Updike’s other novels and many of his early short stories.  My God, the man was talented!

People sometimes ask me where to start with Updike.  If the questioner is a middle-aged, middle-class male, I will generally send him off in search of the Rabbit novels, in order:  Rabbit, Run; Rabbit Redux; Rabbit is Rich; and Rabbit at Rest.  (I imagine women read those books too – but I don’t think I have ever met one who has.  That’s strange: rest assured that the Rabbit books have plenty of literary merit that all thoughtful readers may enjoy.)

A few years ago I realized that Updike had written another series of books, about a character very different from Harry “Rabbit” Angstrom.  Henry Bech is a Jewish author, generally housed on the Upper West Side of New York City and thought to be a mash-up of Roth, Mailer, Malamud, Salinger and sundry other Jewish writers (as well as the decidedly not-Jewish Mr. Updike himself).  There are three Bech books, which are not really novels but collections of short stories – some of them of novella length, and 20 stories in all – that are chronological but not continuous.  They are Bech: A Book, Bech Is Back and Bech at Bay, conveniently collected in the single volume The Complete Henry Bech.  Bech is an antihero.  Where Updike was prolific, Bech’s oeuvre emerges slowly, painfully.  Bech is a womanizer, who finally marries, moves to the suburbs, writes a blockbuster best-seller, and divorces.  Later, at a much advanced age, he takes a younger lover (or does she take him?) and has a child.  Updike’s satire of writers, publishers, and yes, Updike himself, cumulates through these stories.  Early on, I wasn’t entirely sure what to make of Mr. Bech, who spends some of his time traveling around the world on literary cultural exchanges.  But halfway through these stories I was grinning conspiratorially as Bech, and his life, became more and more wicked.  By the end I found myself enjoying one of the great curmudgeons in literature.  Updike has never been more urbane, polished, erudite, never more pointed in his quite lethal satire.  It’s great fun if you stick with it.  Highly recommended!