June 2009

What's Updike?

This time, something different, yet arguably similar.

I didn't plan this. My last jottings here in Books Beyond Print I wrote about reading a book and feeling mildly annoyed by the cover image.

This time, well...yes, let's start at the beginning.

John Updike, a novelist who enjoyed the enviable fulcrumular status between popular and acclaimed, teetering to the one side enough to have inspired a film or two (Witches of Eastwick comes to mind) and to the other enough to have a ready outlet for his own criticism at The New Yorker, died, earlier this year.

About a year ago I decided I should read some Updike. Figuring (of course) to start at the beginning, and anticipating a long arc of literary discovery picking and choosing among the oevre of this prolific author, I dug up an old paperback copy of his first major success, Rabbit, Run.

I read a dozen pages, and stopped. Again, I didn't plan it that way, but the story didn't grab hold of me. Opening with a young executive horning in on a playground hoops skirmish then smoking cigarettes and being tired of his soppy wife, well, it was sort of a so what story for me, and perhaps a tad mundane.

I tried again, same book, a month later with similar results. So when we began cleaning out unwanted books for our upcoming move, Rabbit, Run joined that category without alot of hemhaw.

Then, not much later, but after John Updike passed on, I read some of the recaps and remembrances. In particular I remember one piece, possibly in the Wall Street Journal, that described the man's work as beautifully written, yet in the end not fully satisfying, due to some general unroundness, or perhaps an abundance of dazzling surface and consequent lack of depth.

So be it, I thought to myself, remembering my attempts at Rabbit.

Still, I was faintly disappointed, I think more in myself than in Updike, for not giving a little more, in the give-and-take that underlines the relationship between reader and writer.

Another opportunity to give giving another go came around again just two weeks ago.

Among our library of paperbacks that hadn't been culled for the move, I was browsing for a Stegner that I hadn't read yet. All I could find was his outstanding Angle of Repose, and which I read shortly after Stegner wrote it. It was long ago, decades, so I considered a re-read, but instead chose to browse further.

And there, a few spines away, was a paperback that stood out because its spine was blank. I popped it out of the shelf and saw that it had no cover at all. Weathered and dust-worn to a golden white, this book starts right there on the review-quotes page. Usually a skinned-alive book like this is has been dealt an intended death blow, has been consigned to remainder status, yet has somehow survived through paperback limbo and found its way back to a stack, shelf, a reader.

And however this book had gotten here, it had found a reader. I am almost finished Updike's 354 pages from the viewpoint of the fictional Roger Lambert, and I have read it rather quickly, in great gulps, but with dry days between. It's one of those books, encountered rarely, that certainly keep you reading, and eagerly at that, but I can't quite say that I love it, or that it's a great book, or even a great read. Like one of the judges said recently about a certain performance by another provocateur named Lambert on our highest rated pop-music reality show, "It's just strange...but I like it."

Yes, Updike got his third chance, with this bareback edition of his 1986 Roger's Version. And did not disappoint.

Which brings us to this: Last time, it was French Liutenants Woman, with more cover than I would have liked. This time, I'm writing about a book with no cover.

I always liked hardbacks better than paperbacks, though in recent years that has changed some because I do appreciate the size and convenience of a compact softbound, in some circumstances. But I'm realizing that part of that previous preference was that hardbacks often had no distracting cover image, while generally with a paperback you're stuck with whatever imagery one editor or department envisioned.

So, let's muse a bit on this cover. What did it look like? Would it have annoyed me? I don't want to give the wrong impression, I do like some covers. Occasionally I will like a paperback cover, even a cheesy one, better than the book itself. I can think of some examples, but let's not go there yet.

Roger's Version is Roger Lambert's recounting of a few months, fall into winter, and approaching spring, of his life story taking place midway through Ronald Reagan's second term, in a university town in New England, in his early fifties, in his second marriage, and his second career as a divinity professor.

His first marriage and first career, as a protestant pastor, ended simultaneously 15 years previous when he met and dillydallied with young Esther.

Now, Roger is a bit weary and jaded, quite outspoken and unashamedly forthright in his blistering critiques of his world, the world, academia, his wife, her affair, his own wandering appetites, and least of all, of himself.

A grad student he's advising is trying to use computers to find God's footprints, and Roger would prefer that he fail. He'd prefer to let the mystery be. He never quite says this, but perhaps it's because success would sort of leave him without a demonstrable means of support.

You're probably wondering how somebody can unashamedly blister his own self. Well, I get the feeling that Updike is the master of this sort of teetering ambiguity. This work is built on such tensions, smoldering contradictions, pleasing pains and painful pleasures. All the while exploring the nature of God and Man and man's machines and youth and aging, and the contrasts are quite bracing and beautifully woven.

Here's what I'm thinking was the cover:

I see windows in a twilight scene, lighted windows, leaves blowing, late fall, the quiet streets of an outlying faculty neighborhood...in a watercolor style...hints in one of those golden windows of two figures in siloette, though in the foreground our fallen minister stands. Not walking, not hurrying home. We see him in his overcoat, from behind. Is he looking up at the window? Or is he turning to look back, over his shoulder, at..?

Eh? Well, maybe not.

Here's a cover that would have annoyed me.

All the major characters at the Thanksgiving table in the Lambert dining room--Roger, his wife Esther, his wayward dropout unwedlock-mother niece Verna, and Dale, the computer scientist grad student who argues for God's scientific existence against seminary professor Roger who argues because the argument itself is inarguable--or if not inarguable, irrelevant. And it's one of those covers where the artist was told what to illustrate, rather than read the book and revisualize its essence, because Roger, who should be a droopy-dog type personified, looks like Cliff Robertson, and Esther looks like she's about to try out to play Peter Pan in the Mary Martin (gymnast) tradition, Dale looks about right, and Verna somehow, in this artist's mind (or in his instructions) was cast as Sissy Spacek. And they're all looking at little Paula, who's staring straight out at us readers, Mona-Lisa like.

(Now, of course you know what I'm going to do after a few more paragraphs of musing about this book's possible cover, and covers in general; I'm going to go to the amazing internet and type "Roger's Version" into Google and hit the "Images" tab and find the actual paperback cover from the late 1980s. It'll be fun to see how far off... or how nearly missing... any of these musings ended up...)

I wonder; if they reissued Roger's Game around five years ago, or around now, how would they illustrate the cover? That bleary haphazard cropped photo style seen so often these days...Soft focus woman's skirt and legs in motion, or a raindrop-spattered window pane with a quarter of a woman's face--pick your quadrant, top, bottom, left, right...or a quarter slice cropping away the forehead and chin, leaving nose and mouth, and some big lettering and several fonts and some muted gray purply colors and some kind of fading pattern somewhere... ...Somewhere I'm sure right now there's a book cover artist cutting a photograph of a woman in a dress into four or five little discrete pieces...most likely for a woman author's books...maybe get two, even three separate covers out of one photo. The feet. The legs. The hurrying pocketbook.

I remember some 60s or 70s covers, some perhaps jacketing actual early Updikes, with sweepy stylized figures in a sketchy style, not detailed but very impressionist, outlines, oblique, dark orange on white or green...

But Roger's Version...it was the 80s, the late 80s, and Updike at that. Here's what I'll "Predict" the actual paperback cover of Roger's Version looked like;

A blocky, colorful design. No scenic illustration. No figures, no clear symbols. Roger's Version lettered fairly large, in a big playful blocky font, possibly with texture added to the lettering somehow, by texture I mean squiggly or optical repetition. Maybe there are reflective elements, but in a rather abstract way, reflections of the letters in watery foreground, suggesting a receding to infinity. Or a perspective play with a similar feel, dimensionality, the vanishing point to an infinite distance. Bold colors.

I think the other trend, especially for the top authors during that decade, was a very stately, even bland sort of cover. Sometimes no design at all, just the title and the author, not necessarily in that order. What do they call it when there's a narrow window a couple inches high across the middle of the cover--a mail slot?-- a gun turret?--anyway, the top and bottom are light brown or maroon, and across the middle is a swath of landscape, a sycamore in the sunlight, or a suburb under fresh snow.

Above the humanless periscope slice, John Updike in pretty-big serif letters. Below the slice, Roger's Version. Italics.

Now, let's go look at The Actual Covers, as found in Yahoo and Google image searches....