Certainly not a major work - Updike is under no illusions either, having subtitled it "a quasi-novel" - but these five, self-contained, uneven stories featuring Jewish writer Harry Bech, are hilarious. First introduced to the Updike canon in 1970, the creation of Bech was no doubt intended to show that the urbane Episcopalian WASP from Shillington, Pennsylvania could offer his own variation of the most enduring of US literary myths, the angst-ridden Jewish American writer. Last seen in 1983 in Bech is Back during which, now married, he travelled a lot and wrote little, while "his books continued, as if ironically, to live, to cast shuddering shadows toward the centre of his life, where that thing called reputation cowered," Bech "the semi-obscure American author" has returned as random as ever and is poised, at least in his hectic imagination, to win the Nobel Prize. In the funniest sequence, however, Bech, weary of vicious reviewers, takes revenge on his critics and turns serial killer. Any way you look at it, even a low-key Updike can do pretty much anything - and well.