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In this follow-up to Bech: A Book, Henry Bech, the priapic, peripatetic, and unproductive Jewish American novelist, returns with seven more chapters from his mock-heroic life. He turns fifty in a confusing blend of civic and erotic circumstances while publicizing himself in Australia and Canada. He marries a shiksa and travels with her to Israel, where she falls in love with the land, and to Scotland, where he does. And—sweating buckets! thinking big! minting miracles!—he writes an ingeniously tawdry bestseller. Bech’s aesthetic and moral embarrassments reveal acid truths about both his trade and our times.
This is the second of the three Bech novels. One feels that in these books Updike is very close to his autobiographic material, but clearly, he deals freely with it.Parts of the novel were published separately before, which explains why about the first half of this book continues in the vein of the first book: it consists of more or less haphazard, seemingly aimless literary reports on his travels and encounters with people. The second half about his marriage with Bea is more fictitious. (Updike did, however, marry a second time in 1977, five years before he published this book).The well-known author Bech is working on a book which is called "Think Big". This title can also be applied to him. All the travels described in the book, to Canada and Australia, to the Third World and to Israel, seem to have one function: that Bech is glad to return to the U.S., and especially to New York, with its vitality and energy, its "sins and power" (55). He is glad because he can leave behind the parochialism and narrow-mindedness he meets everywhere, the concepts of reality and politics which seem to be too simple to him. In Jerusalem his Jewishness does not mean much to him: "I've spent my whole life trying to get away from them, trying to think bigger". (72). - He also realizes how limited the importance of his literary work can be to the people he meets: For example, one man just wants to make money with his autographs, his books do not mean too much in the new media world, or they are fitted into too simple patterns of interpretation.Bea, that agreeable, balanced woman (a typical WASP), seems to be the ideal partner for marriage, a safe haven to Bech. Since he has been in a long-lasting crisis as a writer, Bea stirs him on to write regularly and in a disciplined way. And indeed, giving in to his fantasies, he can eventually finish his book and it even becomes a nation-wide triumph. It brings in lots of money plus the amenities of a large, well-furnished house. But his hopes that with Bea "Middle age" and marriage may become his "holy land" (72) turn out to be futile. In spite of all the praise Bech can't shut his eyes to the fact that his bestseller is no good, "it's slapdash, it's sentimental, it's cosy." (136). He exchanges his big home for two drab rooms in New York City.In the last episode we see him together with influential media people. Bech knows about the crude sex, the money transactions, the personal unhappiness under the smooth surface. He feels "unclean" (the last word of the novel), but he is not unhappy. One wonders on what note the trilogy will end in the last part.I think this novel is a bit patched together, but it makes interesting reading not only for experts on Updike. I found it interesting, though not always convincing, how an intellectual of his stature tries to make sense of his life-material.
