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In Russia, where he endures the blatant irony of having a huge salad of royalty rubles thrust on him, Bech and the head of the Soviet Writers' Union joust with vodka glasses: "He toasts Jack London, I toast Pushkin. He does Hemingway, I do Turgenev. I do Nabokov, he counters with John Reed." Elsewhere, Bech vainly attempts to charm Yevtushenko by describing his own position in America not as a literary lion but as a "graying, furtively stylish rat indifferently permitted to gnaw and roam behind the wainscoting of a firetrap about to be demolished anyway."
In Rumania, where he comes to think of himself as "a sort of low-flying U-2," Bech attends an underground cabaret that features an endless number of variety acts, including an East German girl in a cowboy outfit singing Dip in the Hot of Texas. Humor at the expense of literal or imprecise translation is rampant. An admirer slathering to translate Bech into Bulgarian asks, "You are not a wet writer, no. You are a dry writer, yes?"
No and yes. As a dried-out writer, Bech loses some sustaining irony as he gets closer to home. In London, an aggressive young scholar browbeats Bech into explaining his work. A rich young cutie looks up from her pillow and smugly suggests that he "learn to replace ardor with art." Back home, a former student gives him pot and he vomits.
Yet Bech is never really pathetic. He never loses sight of his ludicrous position. Somewhere behind the Iron Curtain. Bech observes that "shallowness can be a kind of honesty." It is a remark worthy of Oscar Wilde. It is unlikely, however, that Wilde—who never lost the knack of drawing life from the surface of things—would have fudged with "kind of."