MOVE OVER RABBIT: GIVING BECH THE STAR TREATMENT 

The Complete Henry Bech
John Updike

Scott Bernard Nelson 
The Boston Globe 

   Updike aficionados are well versed in the life and death, the fall and rise, of Harry “Rabbit’’ Angstrom. Angstrom is the prolific author’s fictional Everyman whose directionless and disillusioned stumble through life earned Updike a pair of Pulitzer prizes and filled four novels and a subsequent short story. 
   The other major recurring character in Updike’s oeuvre is less well-known, but almost as directionless as Angstrom - and definitely more cynical, if not disillusioned. 
   Henry Bech made his first appearance in a New Yorker short story in 1964, and has resurfaced 19 equally brief times since. A trio of earlier volumes brought together some of the stories, but “The Complete Henry Bech’’ is the first to put them all under a single cover. 
   That’s a bonus for collectors, but makes for something of a strange read. 
   Updike used Bech over the years as a literary device, a way into narratives that in many cases had little in common otherwise. He adjusted some details for republication in 
   “The Complete Henry Bech’’ to keep the stories from contradicting each other, but readers are left with a curiously disjointed take on the central character’s curious life. 
   But it’s still classic Updike, grimly funny and fabulously written. Considered on their individual merits, some of the shorts are gems. On the surface, Bech appears to be everything Updike is not. 
   Bech is Jewish, for starters, unlike his Pennsylvania-native Lutheran creator. He also has trouble understanding why anyone would want to live outside Manhattan, whereas Updike settled on the rural North Shore of Massachusetts. 
   Bech, too, fights almost perpetual writer’s block, while Updike is one of the most productive writers alive. And, despite one short and doomed attempt at marriage, Bech is an inexorable bachelor. Updike, meanwhile, has married twice and raised three children. 
   Still, there are times when Bech is clearly a surrogate for Updike, especially when he takes well-aimed cannon shots at the literary establishment, the press, academe, and dozens of other deserving targets. 
   “The Complete Henry Bech’’ begins with the fictional author’s tour behind the Iron Curtain as an artistic ambassador during the Cold War, before moving on to his speaking tour of American college campuses. 
   In both cases, Bech shows thinly veiled disdain for the people he meets and places he goes. But he is happy, if baffled, to be the center of attention and is ever on the lookout for his next sexual conquest. 
   Later, Bech has mistresses, is shamed into smoking marijuana, ruminates on his childhood, gets married, moves to the suburbs, travels some more, writes a low-brow bestseller, has an affair, gets divorced, and moves back to the city. Through it all, Updike uses Bech to send up American society in the coldly caustic way his readers have come to expect. 
   Bech’s best is saved for the last third of the book. The five stories that appeared together in “Bech at Bay’’ in 1998, and which make up the tail end of “The Complete Henry Bech,’’ show what Updike can do when he really cuts loose. 
   In “Bech Presides,’’ Updike’s alter ego is voted president of a group of aging, squabbling, and fading members of the intelligentsia, who are uniformly convinced that none among the younger generations are worthy of joining their ranks. And in “Bech Pleads Guilty,’’ a Hollywood agent sues Bech over a magazine article, giving Updike a chance to lampoon the entertainment industry. 
   The darkest and most biting story, though, is “Bech Noir,’’ which turns into a vengeance fantasy for Updike against all the critics who have blasted his work through the years. Literally donning a cape and working with a sidekick calling herself Robin, Bech turns into a homicidal stalker tracking down the authors of reviews he internalized as “an assault, a virtual murder, a purely malicious attempt to unman and destroy him.’’ 
   Finally, in “Bech and the Bounty of Sweden,’’ septuagenarian Bech fathers a child (with Robin) and is awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature. He struggles to write a suitable acceptance speech and to decide how worthwhile his life has been. 
At one point, Bech tells an interviewer that “the purpose of the writer is to amuse himself.’’ No doubt, Updike accomplished that with the Bech stories - and there’s plenty for readers to enjoy, as well. 
   Scott Bernard Nelson can be reached by e-mail at nelson@globe.com.