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Overview
Product Details
ISBN-13: | 9780307482068 |
---|---|
Publisher: | Random House Publishing Group |
Publication date: | 12/30/2008 |
Series: | Bech , #3 |
Sold by: | Random House |
Format: | eBook |
Pages: | 256 |
File size: | 2 MB |
About the Author
![About The Author](http://img.images-bn.com/static/redesign/srcs/images/grey-box.png?v11.11.4)
John Updike was born in Shillington, Pennsylvania, in 1932. He graduated from Harvard College in 1954 and spent a year in Oxford, England, at the Ruskin School of Drawing and Fine Art. From 1955 to 1957 he was a member of the staff of The New Yorker. His novels have won the Pulitzer Prize, the National Book Award, the National Book Critics Circle Award, the Rosenthal Foundation Award, and the William Dean Howells Medal. In 2007 he received the Gold Medal for Fiction from the American Academy of Arts and Letters. John Updike died in January 2009.
Date of Birth:
March 18, 1932Date of Death:
January 27, 2009Place of Birth:
Shillington, PennsylvaniaPlace of Death:
Beverly Farms, MAEducation:
A.B. in English, Harvard University, 1954; also studied at the Ruskin School of Drawing and Fine Art in Oxford, EnglandRead an Excerpt
BECH HAD A NEW SIDEKICK. Her monicker was Robin. Rachel
"Robin" Teagarten. Twenty-six, post-Jewish, frizzy big hair, figure on the
short and solid side. She interfaced for him with an IBM PS/1 his
publisher had talked him into buying. She set up the defaults, rearranged
the icons, programmed the style formats, accessed the ANSI character
sets--Bech was a stickler for foreign accents. When he answered a letter,
she typed it for him from dictation. When he took a creative leap, she
deciphered his handwriting and turned it into digitized code. Neither
happened very often. Bech was of the Ernest Hemingway
save-your-juices school. To fill the time, he and Robin slept together. He
was seventy-four, but they worked with that. Seventy-four plus
twenty-six was one hundred; divided by two, that was fifty, the prime of
life. The energy of youth plus the wisdom of age. A team. A duo.
They were in his snug aerie on Crosby Street. He was reading the
Times at breakfast: caffeineless Folgers, calcium-reinforced D'Agostino
orange juice, poppy-seed bagel lightly toasted. The crumbs and poppy
seeds had scattered over the newspaper and into his lap but you don't
get something for nothing, not on this hard planer. Bech announced to
Robin, "Hey, Lucas Mishner is dead."
A creamy satisfaction--the finest quality, made extra easy to spread by
the toasty warmth--thickly covered his heart.
"Who's Lucas Mishner?" Robin asked. She was deep in the D
section--Business Day. She was a practical-minded broad with no
experience of culture prior to 1975.
"Once-powerful critic," Bech told her, biting off his phrases. "Late
Partisan Review school. Used to condescend to appear in the Trib
Book Review, when the Trib was still alive on this side of the Atlantic.
Despised my stuff. Called it 'superficially energetic but lacking in the true
American fiber, the grit, the wrestle.' That's him talking, not me. The grit,
the wrestle. Sanctimonious bastard. When The Chosen came out in '63,
he wrote, 'Strive and squirm as he will, Bech will never, never be
touched by the American sublime.' The simple, smug, know-it-all son of
a bitch. You know what his idea of the real stuff was? James Jones.
James Jones and James Gould Cozzens."
There Mishner's face was, in the Times, twenty years younger, with a
fuzzy little rosebud smirk and a pathetic slicked-down comb-over like
limp Venetian blinds throwing a shadow across the dome of his head.
The thought of him dead filled Bech with creamy ease. He told Robin,
"Lived way the hell up in Connecticut. Three wives, no flowers. Hadn't
published for years. The rumor in the industry was he was gaga with
alcoholic dementia."
"You seem happy."
"Very."
"Why? You say he had stopped being a critic anyway."
"Not in my head. He tried to hurt me. He did hurt me. Vengeance is
mine."
"Who said that?"
"The Lord. In the Bible. Wake up, Robin."
"I thought it didn't sound like you," she admitted. "Stop hogging the
Arts section. Let's see what's playing in the Village. I feel like a movie
tonight."
"I'm not reading the Arts section."
"But it's under what you are reading."
"I was going to get to it."
"That's what I call hogging. Pass it over."
He passed it over, with a pattering of poppy seeds on the
polyurethaned teak dining table Robin had installed. For years he and his
female guests had eaten at a low glass coffee table farther forward in the
loft. The sun slanting in had been pretty, but eating all doubled up had
been bad for their internal organs. Robin had got him to take vitamins,
too, and the calcium-reinforced o.j. She thought it would straighten his
spine. He was in his best shape in years. She had got him doing sit-ups
and push-ups. He was hard and quick, for a man who'd had his Biblical
three score and ten. He was ready for action. He liked the tone of his
own body. He liked the cut of Robin's smooth broad jaw across the teak
table. Her healthy big hair, her pushy plump lips, her little flattened nose.
"One down," he told her, mysteriously.
But she was reading the Arts section, the B section, and didn't hear.
"Con Air, Face/Off," she read. This was the summer of 1997. "Air
Force One, Men in Black. They're all violent. Disgusting."
"Why are you afraid of a little violence?" he asked her. "Violence is
our poetry now, now that sex has become fatally tainted."
"Or Contact," Robin said. "From the reviews it's all about how the
universe secretly loves us."
"That'll be the day," snarled Bech. Though in fact the juices surging
inside him bore a passing resemblance to those of love. Mishner dead put
another inch on his prick.
A week later, he was in the subway. The Rockefeller Center station
on Sixth Avenue, the old IND line. The downtown platform was
jammed. All those McGraw-Hill, Exxon, and Time-Life execs were
rushing back to their wives in the Heights. Or going down to West 4th to
have some herbal tea and put on drag for the evening. Monogamous
transvestite executives were clogging the system. Bech was in a savage
mood. He had been to MoMA, checking out the Constructivist
film-poster show and the Project 60 room. The room featured three
"ultra-hip," according to the new New Yorker, figurative painters: one
who did "poisonous portraits of fashion victims," another who specialized
in "things so boring that they verge on nonbeing," and a third who did
"glossy, seductive portraits of pop stars and gay boys." None of them
had been Bech's bag. Art had passed him by. Literature was passing him
by. Music he had never gotten exactly with, not since USO record hops.
Those cuddly little WACs from Ohio in their starched uniforms. That war
had been over too soon, before he got to kill enough Germans.
Down in the subway, in the flickering jaundiced light, three competing
groups of electronic buskers--one country, one progressive jazz, and one
doing Christian hip-hop--were competing, while a huge overhead voice
unintelligibly burbled about cancellations and delays. In the cacophony,
Bech spotted an English critic: Raymond Featherwaite, former
Cambridge eminence lured to CUNY by American moolah. From his
perch in the CUNY crenellations, using an antique matchlock arquebus,
he had been snottily potting American writers for twenty years, courtesy
of the ravingly Anglophile New York Review of Books. Prolix and
voulu, Featherwaite had called Bech's best-selling comeback book,
Think Big, back in 1979. Inflation was peaking under Carter, the AIDS
virus was sallying forth unidentified and unnamed, and here this limey
carpetbagger was calling Bech's chef-d'oeuvre prolix and voulu. When,
in the deflationary epoch supervised by Reagan, Bech had ventured a
harmless collection of highly polished sketches and stories called Biding
Time, Featherwaite had written, "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. The pleasures of microscopy pall."
The combined decibels of the buskers drowned out, for all but the
most attuned city ears, the approach of the train whose delay had been
so indistinctly bruited. Featherwaite, like all these Brits who were
breeding like woodlice in the rotting log piles of the New York literary
industry, was no slouch at pushing ahead. Though there was hardly room
to place one's shoes on the filthy concrete, he had shoved and wormed
his way to the front of the crowd, right to the edge of the platform. His
edgy profile, with its supercilious overbite and artfully projecting
eyebrows, turned with arrogant expectancy toward the screamingly
approaching D train, as though hailing a servile black London taxi or
gilded Victorian brougham. Featherwaite affected a wispy-banged Nero
haircut. There were rougelike touches of color on his cheekbones. The
tidy English head bit into Bech's vision like a branding iron.
Prolix, he thought, Voulu. He had had to look up voulu in his French
dictionary. It put a sneering curse on Bech's entire oeuvre, for what, as
Schopenhauer had asked, isn't willed?
Bech was three bodies back in the crush, tightly immersed in the
odors, clothes, accents, breaths, and balked wills of others. Two
broad-backed bodies, padded with junk food and fermented malt,
intervened between himself and Featherwaite, while others importunately
pushed at his own back. As if suddenly shoved from behind, he lowered
his shoulder and rammed into the body ahead of his; like dominoes, it
and the next tipped the third, the stiff-backed Englishman, off the
platform. In the next moment the train with the force of a flash flood
poured into the station, drowning all other noise under a shrieking gush of
tortured metal. Featherwaite's hand in the last second of his life had shot
up and his head jerked back as if in sudden recognition of an old
acquaintance. Then he had vanished.
It was an instant's event, without time for the D-train driver to brake or
a bystander to scream. Just one head pleasantly less in the compressed,
malodorous mob. The man ahead of Bech, a ponderous black with
bloodshot eyes, wearing a knit cap in the depths of summer, regained his
balance and turned indignantly, but Bech, feigning a furious glance behind
him, slipped sideways as the crowd arranged itself into funnels beside
each door of the now halted train. A woman's raised voice--foreign,
shrill--had begun to leak the horrible truth of what she had witnessed,
and far away, beyond the turnstiles, a telepathic policeman's whistle was
tweeting. But the crowd within the train was surging obliviously outward
against the crowd trying to enter, and in the thick eddies of disgruntled
and compressed humanity nimble, bookish, elderly Bech put more and
more space between himself and his unwitting accomplices. He secreted
himself a car's length away, hanging from a hand-burnished bar next to an
ad publicizing free condoms and clean needles, with a dainty Oxford
edition of Donne's poems pressed close to his face as the news of the
unthinkable truth spread, and the whistles of distant authority drew
nearer, and the train refused to move and was finally emptied of
passengers, while the official voice overhead, louder and less intelligible
than ever, shouted word of cancellation, of disaster, of evacuation
without panic.
[CHAPTER CONTINUES IN EXCERPT #2...]
Obediently Bech left the stalled train, blood on its wheels, and climbed
the metallic stairs sparkling with pulverized glass. His insides shuddered in
tune with the shoving, near-panicked mob about him. He inhaled the
outdoor air and Manhattan anonymity gratefully. Avenue of the
Americas, a sign said, in stubborn upholding of an obsolete gesture of
hemispheric good will. Bech walked south, then over to Seventh Avenue.
Scrupulously he halted at each red light and deposited each handed-out
leaflet (GIRLS! COLLEGE SEX KITTENS TOPLESS!
BOTTOMLESS AFTER 6:30 P.M.!) in the next city trash receptacle.
He descended into the Times Square station, where the old IRT system's
innumerable tunnels mingled their misery in a vast subterranean maze of
passageways, stairs, signs, and candy stands. He bought a Snickers bar
and leaned against a white-tiled pillar to read where his little book had
fallen open,
Death, be not proud, though some have called thee
Mighty and dreadful, for thou art not so;
For those whom thou think'st thou dost overthrow
Die not, poor Death, nor yet canst thou kill me.
He caught an N train that took him to Broadway and Prince. Afternoon
had sweetly turned to evening while he had been underground. The
galleries were closing, the restaurants were opening. Robin was in the
loft, keeping lasagna warm. "I thought MoMA closed at six," she said.
"There was a tie-up in the Sixth Avenue subway. Nothing was running.
I had to walk down to Times Square. I hated the stuff the museum had
up. Violent, attention-getting."
"Maybe there comes a time," she said, "when new art isn't for you, it's
for somebody else. I wonder what caused the tie-up."
"Nobody knew. Power failure. A shootout uptown. Some maniac," he
added, wondering at his own words. His insides felt agitated, purged,
scrubbed, yet not yet creamy. Perhaps the creaminess needed to wait
until the morning Times. He feared he could not sleep, out of nervous
anticipation, yet he toppled into dreams while Robin still read beneath a
burning light, as if he had done a long day's worth of physical labor.
ENGLISH CRITIC, TEACHER DEAD / IN WEST SIDE
SUBWAY MISHAP, the headline read. The story was low on the front
page and jumped to the obituaries. The obit photo, taken decades ago,
glamorized Featherwaite--head facing one way, shoulders another--so he
resembled a younger, less impish brother of George Sanders. High brow,
thin lips, cocky glass chin.... according to witnesses appeared to fling
himself under the subway train as it approached the platform. ...
colleagues at CUNY puzzled but agreed he had been under
significant stress compiling permissions for his textbook of
postmodern narrative strategies ... former wife, reached in London,
allowed the deceased had been subject to mood swings and fits of
creative despair ... the author of several youthful satirical novels
and a single book of poems likened to those of Philip Larkin ...
Robert Silvers of The New York Review expressed shock and termed
Featherwaite "a valued and versatile contributor of unflinching
critical integrity" ... born in Scunthorpe, Yorkshire, the third child
and only son of a greengrocer and a part-time piano teacher ... and
so on. A pesky little existence. "Ray Featherwaite is dead," Bech
announced to Robin, trying to keep a tremble of triumph out of his voice.
"Who was he?"
"A critic. More minor than Mishner. English. Came from Yorkshire, in
fact--I had never known that. Went to Cambridge on a scholarship. I
had figured him for inherited wealth; he wanted you to think so."
"That makes two critics this week," said Robin, preoccupied by the
dense gray pages of stock prices.
"Every third person in Manhattan is some kind of critic," Bech pointed
out. He hoped the conversation would move on.
"How did he die?"
There was no way to hide it; she would be reading this section
eventually. "Jumped under a subway train, oddly. Seems he'd been
feeling low, trying to secure too many copyright permissions or
something. These academics have a lot of stress. It's a tough world
they're in--the faculty politics is brutal."
"Oh?" Robin's eyes--bright, glossy, the living volatile brown of a slick
moist pelt--had left the stock prices. "What subway line?"
"Sixth Avenue, actually."
"Maybe that was the tie-up you mentioned."
"Could be. Very likely, in fact. Did I ever tell you that my father died in
the subway, under the East River in his case? Made a terrible mess of
rush hour."
"Yes, Henry," Robin said, in the pointedly patient voice that let him
know she was younger and clearer-headed. "You've told me more than
once."
"Sorry."
"So why are your hands trembling? You can hardly hold your bagel."
And his other hand, he noticed, was making the poppy seeds vibrate on
the obituary page, as if a subway train were passing underneath.
"Who knows?" he asked her. "I may be coming down with something.
I went out like a light last night."
"I'll say," said Robin, returning her eyes to the page. That summer the
stock prices climbed up and up, breaking new records every day. It was
unreal.
"Sorry," he repeated. Ease was beginning to flow again within him. The
past was sinking, every second, under fresher, obscuring layers of the
recent past. "Did it make you feel neglected? A young woman needs her
sex."
"No," she said. "It made me feel tender. You seemed so innocent, with
your mouth sagging open."
[CHAPTER CONTINUES ...]
Table of Contents
BECH IN CZECH........................................................3 BECH PRESIDES.......................................................37 BECH PLEADS GUILTY.................................................117 BECH NOIR..........................................................152 BECH AND THE BOUNTY OF SWEDEN......................................210
Interviews
On Tuesday, October 27, 1998, barnesandnoble.com welcomed John Updike, author of BECH AT BAY.
Moderator: It is an honor that we can welcome you online tonight, Mr. Updike. Do you have any opening comments for your online audience?
John Updike: No, not really. I am flattered that there is an online audience. I am offline myself, so this is a brave new world to me.
Dale from Williamsburg: The story "Bech Noir" is obviously a darkly funny one. But is there perhaps a kind of moral here -- perhaps that writers take themselves too seriously? Or is that too obvious?
John Updike: Maybe writers do take themselves too seriously, but I think my basic idea here was, in the realm of print, what level fierce competition and murder obtain. By killing a few critics, Bech is only attempting to repay criticism that has tried to annihilate him. I am not recommending that people emulate Bech, but the rage is actual and instinctual.
Davin Quinn from Burke, Virginia: Mr. Updike, at a time when ethnic diversity and tolerance are lauded values, do you find yourself (and especially in the case of Henry Bech, from the Jewish American perspective) being more careful about the types of thoughts concerning ethnicity you attribute to your characters?
John Updike: Yes. I think that all this talk of political correctness and tolerance has certainly gotten through to people like Henry Bech, but he, being a city man and himself in an ethnic minority, probably was always tolerant and generous-spirited. In the case of a less-enlightened character like Rabbit Angston, there could be no fudging the racist undercurrent of some of his thoughts, but he too in the course of the four novels learns some tolerance and understanding, without ever being, I fear, totally politically correct. A novelist's job is not to present the world as it should be but as it actually is, and we all have ethnic awareness as part of our general awareness.
Neil McAleer from Baltimore, MD: Good evening, Mr. Updike. Have you ever done a full piece on your literary fans, especially the more eccentric ones? In BECH AT BAY, you talk about Bech's signing sessions in Czechoslovakia. Did the Czechs really open their books to the title page? And have you ever felt, like Beck, that these autographed books were "like so many checks that would bounce"? Again, about your fans, the people who especially appreciate you and your work: Do you know how many pets are named Updike after you? I know of a particular male Siamese cat named Updike, and the name carries well throughout our neighborhood. He almost always comes when he's called. Are you aware of other pets named after you? Cheers!
John Updike: I was in a Boston aquarium some years ago at a poetry reading, and that very night a baby seal was born, and in honor of me being there, they named him Updike. I fear the seal did not have a very young or healthy life. That is the only animal I knew of to be honored with my name. To answer your first question, I have never written a piece exactly as you describe, but in a number of the Bech stories, various alleged fans are described in their approach to my beleaguered hero. I recommend in BECH: A BOOK the story called "Bech Slings." He grapples with one persistent interviewer. And in the first story in BECH IS BACK, he copes with an avid collector and several telephone callers. I am delighted to think I have fans, but at certain moments their attentions can be distracting.
Dale from Williamsburg: Bech is a wordsmith. But we do not know Bech through his writings so much as his thought processes, which are often tormented. Is Bech satirizing himself? Bech, a mediocrity, is brilliantly conceived: Is this your "joke" on the reader? That we should examine so many brilliant facets only to discover dross?
John Updike: Several examples of Bech writings do occur in the Bech saga -- I call to your attention his excellent introduction to BECH: A BOOK, and to the fine Festschrift contribution that he writes in "Bech Presides" in the present volume. I do not mean to suggest that he is a mediocre writer, but my interest in him centers on him as the writer as public figure, as pseudocelebrity, as a social being, rather than as an artistic creator. His thoughts may be tormented, but then, whose aren't?
J. Fuches from Chicago: Your sheer output over the years continues to amaze me. You don't seem to share Henry Bech's case of writer's block. How do you do it? What kind of writing schedule do you keep?
John Updike: I have arranged my life so there is no other job to prevent me from going upstairs after breakfast and writing for the morning. I begin around 9am and end a little after 1pm, when I am hungry and probably have written my days quota. When engaged in a long project, I try to meet a quota of three pages a day. Better to meet a modest quota every day than to try to write in binges. By these modest procedures, I have managed to accumulate a great deal of manuscript. But ideally, much of my day should be, in a strict sense, idle, for it is often in idle moments that real inspiration comes.
Mark Dukas from Oakland, CA: You have spoken before of the "shapes" of your fiction, the Y shape of THE POORHOUSE FAIR, the zigzag of RABBIT, RUN. There is a also the triangle of the Scarlet Letter trilogy, a four-sidedness to the four Rabbit books, as well as the four generations of IN THE BEAUTY OF THE LILIES. PROBLEMS is literally covered with a geometry problem. TOWARD THE END OF TIME includes some parallel lines and a large, hovering torus. How consciously do you play with these geometric shapes in your fiction? Does the geometry have anything to do with the influence of your junior high math teacher also being your dad?
John Updike: That is a very good question, and you show an intimate acquaintance with my work. I began as a would-be cartoonist and gravitate in my conceptualizations toward clear shapes. I think it is useful to be able to visualize, in however rudimentary a form, the story line you are working on, and I suppose, yes, that my fondness for mathematics and geometry, as communicated to me by my father, has strengthened this tendency toward, as you say, rectangles, triangles, and other simple shapes. These shapes, of course, are just skeletons; one still has to try to imagine flesh for them.
Elise from Brooklyn, NY: Hi, Mr. Updike. I just read the review in last Sunday's New York Times, and it mentioned that BECH AT BAY might be your last in the Bech series. Is this true? If not, how long do you envision the series continuing?
John Updike: I certainly have no immediate plans for any sequel. It would depend in part upon how much longer I have to live and to some extent how much longer Henry Bech can go on. He is 75; I am 66. I would not predict a very long future for either of us. But I confess that he remains dear to me, and a few ideas for further stories have flitted across my brain. We shall see what comes of these.
Davin Quinn from Burke, Virginia: Mr. Updike, to what (or whom) do you attribute your writer's aesthetic sense, or what has informed the voice and style you use in your fictional prose? And just how much does revision contribute to the voice? Do you rely on strong first drafts or heavy revisions?
John Updike: A complex set of questions. In brief, my aesthetic notions of writing have come of my sense of the importance of writing well, beginning with my mother's example: She wanted to be a writer, and had very refined and enthusiastic tastes. I loved reading as a child and adolescent various modes of fantasy and escapism. In college I came to grasp some of the classics of English literature -- Shakespeare, above all -- and actually specialized not in prose but in poetry. My love of The New Yorker magazine and my early acceptance as a contributor there no doubt helped shape my taste. Certain of the 20th-century masters -- let me name Marcel Proust, the English novelist Henry Green, and J. D. Salinger influenced me forcefully. My fondness for graphic art, and pictorial art in general, no doubt played a part in my approach and in my style. You ask about revision -- I try, as I said in the previous answer, to begin with a shape in my mind, but paragraph by paragraph, sentence by sentence, of course there is much revision and adjustment, right up to the last proof that I see. And yet I feel that the short story or novel should eventually take the form it first had in your mind, so in this sense I don't believe that a work can be revised into shape. Many writers do seem to think so, but I think that the important revisions take place in your head before you begin.
Mark from Detroit: In BECH AT BAY, I found it hilarious that you axed a few book critics as revenge for Bech. As a critic yourself, do you ever worry about the consequences of a poison pen? In your career, was it increasingly difficult to write negative reviews when you yourself knew the value of a good review?
John Updike: I probably have been a somewhat softhearted reviewer because of the rough treatment I received when young and tender. I try to be honest in my reviews, but sympathetic to the idea of literature and to the spirit of the authors attempt. I have written a few negative reviews in my day, but always with some compunction. I think the most useful review is one that enables us to read a book with more pleasure and insight, rather than discourage a reader from his own enjoyment.
Albert Raman from Philadelphia, Pennsylvania: You have a history of writing introductions to books on art and artists. Recently you published an introduction to THE WORLD OF WILLIAM STEIG. In addition to your own reported interest in cartooning and the many connections to The New Yorker art, do you have any comments?
John Updike: My only field of any real expertise in art lies in the field of cartooning, which I studied keenly in the '40s and '50s, when I still had hopes of becoming a cartoonist myself. I was happy to write about William Steig, whose work has always seemed to me quite special, and in a few other instances, I have been happy to write about cartooning and illustration. But my general art expertise is erratic, and when I do write about it, it really is in the mode of self-education.
David Tarpley from Concord, CA: Is there any hope of a peace accord between you and Gore Vidal? It's depressing to read two of my favorite writers periodically insulting each other.
John Updike: I am not aware of insulting Vidal about much. I fear I have not really read him much, so my capacity for insult is limited. I suppose I don't like an automatically sardonic tone, but then he seems not to like my hopeful, optimistic tone either. I have only met the man once, and we had a pleasant, though brief, conversation. I have read some writing by Vidal which I admire, but this does not include his review of my novel IN THE BEAUTY OF THE LILIES.
Mark Dukas from Oakland, CA: You have written marvelously and very openly about the various experiences of being a man, an American, a growing boy in Shillington, and a husband. My question concerns fathers and children. You have written wonderfully from the child's perspective but seem to have been rather circumspect in writing about your own kids and being a father. Is this a mistaken impression, or have you perhaps held back at their request?
John Updike: My children, bless them, have never asked me to hold back. First they were too little to ask and then they were to polite. There is in the collections PROBLEMS and TRUST ME some accounts of paternal love, for instance the stories "Son" and "Daughter Last Glimpse Of." I loved being a father, and hope I have conveyed some of that happiness in print, but possibly as my children became adults I thought to give them some privacy and freedom from my scrutiny. Now I am a grandfather of seven grandsons, and though they have not figured strongly in my fiction, they do figure in my affections.
Gene Sofie from Washougal, WA: Good evening, Mr. Updike. If NASA allowed you on a space shuttle for the purpose of writing about the trip, would you take them up on the offer?
John Updike: If I could be guaranteed a safe return, I might. I have flown a lot in the last 30 years and would like to think I could endure a flight into space. It would be wonderful and terrifying to see our planet from high above. This is an experience that men have had -- even though I have not had it, I feel enriched and dizzied by what man can do. So I answer yes, but with no expectation of being taken up on it.
Jonathan from Seattle: If you had to go to the bookstore tonight and buy one book you haven't read yet, what would you pick?
John Updike: I think I would buy RESURRECTION by Count Leo Tolstoy. He only wrote three full-length novels, and I have always meant to see what the great man did in his relative decline.
Moderator: Thank you so much for joining us tonight, John Updike. It has truly been a pleasure for us, and we wish you the best of luck with BECH AT BAY. Do you have any closing comments for your online audience? How was your first online chat experience?
John Updike: My online chat experience -- it was a new way to compose my thoughts! Not as slow as writing and not as fast as real conversation. I hope my answers possessed some of the virtues of both methods of speech. I thank the questioners for their intelligence and their caring about this particular devotee of the printed word.