Henry Bech, the moderately well known Jewish-American writer who served as the hero of John Updike’s previous Bech: A Book and Bech Is Back, has become older but scarcely wiser. In these five new chapters of his life, he is still at bay, pursued by the hounds of desire and anxiety, of unbridled criticism and publicity in a literary world ever more cheerfully crass.

          Still, our septuagenarian veteran of the literary wars is rewarded in the end with the coveted Nobel, stunning him into a well-deserved silence. It’s not easy being Henry Bech in the post-Gutenbergian world, but somebody has got to do it, and he brings to the tasks that indomitable mixture of grit and ennui that only Updike could make so deliciously funny…..