Description: Henry Bech, the moderately well-known Jewish-American writer who served as the hero of John Updike's Bech: A Book and Bech is Back is older but scarcely wiser. He is still at bay, pursued by the hounds of desire and anxiety, of unbridled criticism and publicity in a literary world every more cheerfully crass. He fights intimations of annihilation in still-Communist Czechoslovakia, while promiscuously consorting with dissidents, apparatchiks, and Midwestern Republicans. Next, he succumbs to the temptations of power by accepting the presidency of a quaint and cossetted honorary body patterned on the Academie Francaise. Then we find him on trial in California and on a criminal rampage in a gothic Gotham in which, gun in hand and abetted by a nubile sidekick called Robin, he breaks into the paretment of his most vicious adversary -- an ancient book critic who is, unfortunately, already at death's door. Lastly Bech triumphs. He wins the Nobel Prize.

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