Criticism > Contemporary Literary Criticism > Updike, John (Vol. 139) - James Shapiro (review date 25 October 1998)


Updike, John (Vol. 139) - James Shapiro (review date 25 October 1998)

James Shapiro (review date 25 October 1998)

SOURCE: “Settling Old Scores,” in New York Times Book Review, October 25, 1998, p. 7.

[In the following review, Shapiro offers a positive assessment of Bech at Bay.]

One's spirits, however initially well disposed toward one of America's more carefully tended reputations, begin severely to sag under the repeated empathetic effort of watching Mr. Bech, page after page, strain to make something of very little.

I didn't write that. An English critic named Raymond Featherwaite, who appears in “Bech Noir,” the wildest story in this volume [Bech at Bay], did. And John Updike sees to it that in revenge for this cursory dismissal of his alter ego, the novelist Henry Bech, Featherwaite is crushed to death under the wheels of a New York subway car. Featherwaite, whose end is swift, is luckier than other reviewers who had nasty things to say about Bech's fiction: one is poisoned,...

[The entire page is 1543 words long]

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