UPDIKE HAS DONE IT AGAIN. THE ABSURDLY PROLIFIC Boston area writer of nearly 50 tomes of poetry, criticism, children's literature and fictive adventures in sensuality-cum-neuroses, John Updike '54 brings us in Bech at Bay a fourth installment of the now aging Manhattan Jewish novelist, Henry Bech. In four short stories, Updike deftly sketches the extremely self-conscious life of a minor writer whose laurels and curls alike are withering on his crown and whose pen has all but run dry.

Highly cerebral and sensual at the same time, the recently divorced Bech is truly close to no one, but knowledgeable about everyone. From this privileged position, he delivers dispassionate, wry judgment on all and sundry; perhaps a sad situation, but a much more entertaining one for us, the readers. Nor does he inspire much pity in us, so crusty and self-sufficient does he seem. The novel is written from Bech's own point of view, and opens on the grizzled, still prodigiously randy gentleman touring the Czech Republic with lissome, admiring dissidents hanging from his gnarled elbows.

In "Bech Presides," the second episode, our star gathers youthful Communists and waxes presidential, taking on, and to his surprise, relishing the leadership of a self-congratulatory honorary intellectual society, "The Forty," a sort of farcical Academie Francaise whose time, like that of its graying laureate-members, is long past.

BECH AT BAY

By John Updike

Knopf

$23, 241 pp.

Updike's prose, as usual, is like the posteriorof one of his protagonist's many women:"gray-clad...firm but a touch more ample than [is]locally fashionable..." Though costumed in theheavily scented, rarefied air of the uptownapartments of the pretentious and over-educated,the novel, in keeping with the spirit of its(anti)hero, is at heart an ever-so-slightlydoddering, luscious, highly sexualized andself-satirical backwards glance at a ratherunremarkable life of letters. His absolutelysucculent, if somewhat condescending descriptionsof leggy, perpetually nude women aside, Updikeexcels in dialogue, cocktail party dialogue, rifewith the sarcastic, incisive mental commentary ofBech. Some of the most revealing scenes in Bechat Bay are to be found in his alwaysflirtatious interactions with women and hisusually acrimonious, acute observations on theposturing of the men he encounters. We read histhoughts, and experience Bech and his worldmediated through Bech; we experience his doubt andself-deprecating double talk from his own perch, aplace oddly, humorously distanced from himself, asthought the life he's constantly dissecting andrevising were someone else's Vacillating betweenmild self-contempt and self-importance, Bechmostly feels that it doesn't matter much. Hefloats beatifically from party to memorial party,counting the boob jobs and Herrera skirts andwondering absently whether he looks as bad as dohis aging colleagues as they jostle and comparehonors.

What attracts me most, however, about Updike'sprose are his unexpected, marvelously aptcomparison. Under his rhapsodic word processor,pocket handkerchiefs become "paisley orchids,"bathrobed women cheese-filled blinis, faces andbodies, foods of all sorts.Photo Courtesy of Knopf