Synopsis
A hilarious college caper lampoons critical theorists, spoofs the New York publishing scene, and parodies seventeen separate literary forms as it follows a search for the missing Professor Adam Snell and his book.
Reviews
In this avant-garde comedy, first novelist Grudin ( Time and the Art of Living ) takes up a plot about a nasty tempest in a college English department, but his real preoccupation is with language and the reflexive nature of literary forms; his novel is a burlesque of itself and of all bookishness. When English professor Adam Snell vanishes from the University of Washagon, his stuffy, jealous colleagues judge him in absentia, trashing his writing, chiefly his novel, Sovrana Sostrata. Spite also motivates Snell's would-be murderer, literary theorist Frank Underwood, also known as Libricide. Snell, however, survives. His editor will be his adoring bride, while his lascivious mistress--in time-honored tradition--is his book. The story emerges in an array of subgenres (e.g., memo, epigraph, marginal gloss, college guide). Interlarded passages from the magisterial 11th edition of the Encyclopaedia Britannica serve as a straight text that bespeaks an innocent, premodern trust in the permanence of words. Grudin's satire targets book people from poets to publishers to nouvelle critique freaks, and if his work is too much of an in-joke to appeal to every reader, its playful elegance, wit and authority make it a gem of its type.
Copyright 1992 Reed Business Information, Inc.
Demented deconstructionist plots to kill gentle humanist and destroy his life's work--in this waggish, intermittently inspired sendup of contemporary academic mores. Washagon College's English department, in thrall to Glanda Gazza, a chair who dreams of seceding, together with a department of literary theory that can dispense with literature altogether, plans to ease out do-nothing Prof. Adam Snell at its May meeting. But the proceedings are disrupted when Snell turns up missing from his home--and all copies of his small-press novel, Sovrana Sostrata, have disappeared too, hunted down by a nemesis who turns out to be crazed rising star Frank Underwood, determined to wipe out every trace of Adam's existence. Adam's few friends find him alive in a nearby corner of the campus (his life preserved by the miraculous qualities of the experimental-growth mucca-grass he's landed in), but Underwood is already practicing with a target pistol for the ultimate act of deconstruction. Can Adam's colleague Hal Emmons and his aspiring republisher Harper Nathan keep him alive long enough for him to finish his new novel, On Wonderment, or will he be marginalized by the profusion of satiric riffs and intertextual jests, by anything from a revolt of footnotes to getting swallowed by his own book? Though first-novelist Grudin (The Grace of Great Things, etc.) never quite pulls his shaggy crime plot, his metatextual bromides, and his satire together, they're all consistently sunny and good-humored. The satiric butts are too familiar and broadly ridiculed to make this as trenchant or funny as David Lodge; it's more likely to remind you of the kinder, gentler academic follies of Jane Langton, or of Michael Malone's Foolscap. -- Copyright ©1992, Kirkus Associates, LP. All rights reserved.
This skillful satire, set at the University of Washagon, pits "evil" literary theorists against classical scholars: someone is trying to kill English professor Adam Snell and his novel. Grudin's concern about the lack of support for creativity in an academic setting, previously explored in the nonfiction work Grace of Great Things ( LJ 5/15/90), here gets a fairy-tale resolution, with fame, wealth, and love coming to Snell as a result of his truth-telling novel Sovrana Sostrata. Funny and perceptive, Book parodies literary forms (there's a revolt among the footnotes) and the power struggles within university life. This unique, well-constructed blend of truth, humor, and suspense is essential for academics: fun to read, but with real sustenance.
- Rebecca S. Kelm, Northern Kentucky Univ., Highland Heights
Copyright 1992 Reed Business Information, Inc.
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