Bech Is Back

First write a short story (all the time making sure it will be published in The New Yorker or Playboy); if it works, write another one, using the same character or characters; when you have written three or four of these, start thinking about grouping them together in book-form (remember: publish and republish your work as much as possible); then write a couple of cementing 'chapters' and offer it to the public as a novel. This is how John Updike has written (among other things) Bech is Back - his second book about a Jewish-American literary novelist prone to writer's block. The advantages of using the compositional method described above are clear: instead of that heavily programmatic, overdetermined, obsolete thing we call 'plot', one gets instead a sequence of snapshots, or a gallery of pictures. We get a book that has obviously evolved organically over time, pushing out roots into only the most fertile soil. We loose old-fashioned unity of design, but we do not miss it. This is writing like a cubist: the by turns judicious and whimsical assembling of fragments of truth, rather than the facile pursuit of an impossible illusion of coherent 'wholeness'. Not a word is wasted in this short, smart, clever, muscular punch of a book.