Book

Robert Grudin's Book is evidence that you can't go back in time. It's further evidence that we are different people at age 20 than at age, um, well, a lot older than that. I have been vaguely obsessing with Book for many years because I remembered it fondly as a clever, clever thing in which footnotes try to take over the story. This memory led me to read Mark Dunn's Ibid (which was not very good, unlike his excellent Ella Minnow Pea, but I digress). The footnote memory was apparently the sum total of what I retained from Book. I couldn't even remember the title or the author. I knew it was out of print and we'd long moved from the library where I had first encountered it so I gave it up for lost, I gave it up to the past. I probably should have left it there, but the sedution of Google and its mysterious means of collecting and finding information proved too great. Suddenly, just before Christmas, I was the happy owner of a piece of my past.

Well, I finally delved back into Mr. Grudin and I spent the next week or so wondering what the heck kind of person I used to be that I had so loved this book. I remembered chuckling my way through it and although there are some funny bits, I can't grasp now what my 20ish self found so hilarious.

Book is a meta-novel and as such is way too complicated to explain properly. The gist of it is that Professor Adam Snell disappears from campus and it becomes apparent that someone is trying to "kill off" his bizarre, remaindered novel and its provocative character along with the man himself. Yep, that's it. The story is steeped in campus politics, particularly English department politics, the tension between theorists and "traditional" English professors. As it's put in Book, between those considering literature itself, and not the theoretical manipulation of literature, [to be] the paramount element in an English degree. The depiction of the theorists is quite funny, actually, but it was a LOT funnier when I was a freshly minted English graduate from a school that had just gone through the upheaval of paring down its Comprehensive English exam from 300 works of literature with which we were required to be familiar, to a mere 80 that featured authors who still make Harold Bloom apoplectic.
The theorists in Book eventually form their own department and spend their days, gleefully uninterrupted by students, theorising and writing and commenting on one another's interpretation angles. The fact that their new offices are in a building which smells so bad they have to wear surgical masks, only adds to the fun.

Ah, but there's the mystery of who is trying to kill Adam Snell, the original author of a poorly received (certainly by his colleagues) novel. Also, how does one go about destroying a work of literature in an effort to erase its heroine along with its author? The killer is dubbed Libricide. Yep, there's a lot of that kind of thing going on, that kind of word play, I mean. There are more GRE-ready words in this book than I've heard in awhile. In a recent post, I was commenting on Nick Hornby's managing to work in the term newel post because I found that so unusual. But how often do we see "pusillanimous" or "bibulously" dropped into casual conversation? The language in Book adds to the feeling that there will be an exam at the end of this, to see if the reader not only followed the many threads and layers of the story, but also managed to pick up some literary theory.

In the end, I could see why I once so enjoyed Book. All the language and nitpicking literary theory was a reminder of my own supposedly scholarly days, but I don't think I much liked it this time around. I didn't really like the main character much, mainly because I thought the book he'd written sounded really annoying to read and I could see why no one liked it (oh, but that turned out to be due to poor marketing. By the end, everyone was falling over one another to promote it). I didn't quite buy Libricide's motivation (more literary theory?), though I enjoyed a lot of the minor characters and the writing. For instance, Harold Emmons, professor of Renaissance literature, raised his grizzled head from a volume of Hermes Trismegistus to greet an apparition that was neither expected nor welcome. Glanda Gazza, who never knocked, marching stoplessly into his office. Also, in speaking of, well, pusillanimity: For whatever reason, you fell back, and the world looked sour and grim to you, sometimes like a crouching beast, sometimes like a cardboard facade, with tiny holes for the convenience of unfriendly eyes.

Interesting stuff, so it's not due to poor writing that Book is out of print. I suspect it's a bit too weird--like the fictional Adam Snell's masterpiece--and also clearly a book for a specific time (about 20 years ago). It doesn't age well. And the much-remembered scene of footnotes taking over? A minor bit, and the footnotes fail.