Bech at Bay: A Quasi-Novel.

UPDIKE, John [Erica Jong].

$300.00

Item Number: 143620

New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1998.

First edition of the third installment in the Pulitzer Prize-winning author’s Bech series. Octavo, original cloth. With an autograph postcard and typed letter signed by Updike to Erica Jong laid in. The recipient, Erica Jong remains best known for her 1973 novel Fear of Flying which became famously controversial for its portrayal of female sexuality and figured prominently in the development of second-wave feminism. Written in the first person and narrated by its protagonist, 29-year-old American poet Isadora Wing, Fear of Flying was written in the throes of the Sexual Revolution of the 1970s and encapsulated the movement’s redefinition of female sexuality. In interviews, Jong stated: “At the time I wrote Fear of Flying, there was not a book that said women are romantic, women are intellectual, women are sexual—and brought all those things together… What [Isadora is] looking for is how to be a whole human being, a body and a mind, and that is what women were newly aware they needed in 1973.” The novel remains a feminist classic and has sold more than 20 million copies worldwide.  With Knopf’s ‘With the compliments of the author’ slip laid in. Fine in a near fine dust jacket. Jacket design by Arnold Roth.

Henry Bech, the moderately well known Jewish-American writer who served as the hero of John Updike's previous Bech: A Book (1970) and Bech Is Back (1982), has become older but scarcely wiser. In these five new chapters from 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.