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....

Her Half-Turned, Half-Veiled Visage Haunts Me...

...every time I sit down to read. Meryl...

For thousands and thousands of years, books were just books. The early Greeks and Romans and Asian civilizations had books, of course, on long scrolls of papyrus or sheepskin. And if somebody wanted to publish, copies were painstakingly hand inked. And yes, perhaps at times in the intervening dozens of centuries books occasionally became something else; plays, most likely.

But these days, and for the past century or so, the most obvious and common reincarnation of a book is to become a movie (for simplicity's sake let's leave TeeVee out of this.)

And when a book becomes a movie, the book itself gets a new life.

I'm on vacation, and I'm reading John Fowles's The French Liutenant's Woman. (I'm in Virginia Beach again, and there are no RD Condensed books in this suite.)

Here, I'm going to digress and talk a bit about book covers.

Book covers are probably more important than one would casually think.

When we read a book, a good book, it takes us away. For a time we are part of another realm, with characters we get to know, and in a world that in one way or another, to a greater or lesser degree, balances within a universe substantially different than the one we occupy in our own everyday lives.

In a historical novel, the fundamental differences are both time and place. Yet, even were I reading a story set in the present day on the Virginia Coast, I would be inhabiting the thoughts and cares of others--both the author's and his characters'. Because of the familiarity of the place, and time, it might feel like a tighter fit, but still there would be that vicariousness, that escape from my own world.

And when we read a book, and lose ourselves in it, the cover--with its illustration, or photography, or geometric design--becomes a reference point, a touchstone, the familiar symbol of that world, that dilatory universe, the doorway that we knock on each time we pick up the book to read, and each time we close that world and re-enter our own.

But when books become movies, it is inevitable--and has been since probably the late 1940s--that chronology and precedence gets perversely reversed, and the pre-existing book now becomes a post-film tie-in, and a scene from the movie, frozen and captured, becomes the paperback's cover.

So in 1981, when the film version of The French Liutenant's Woman released, thousands and thousands of Meryl Streep's stared hauntingly out from the new paperback edition of the 1969 novel, on racks in mall book displays and grocery store checkout lines.

And to this day, Meryl continues her half-shawled, vulnerable, tortured method-acting gaze in thousands of flea markets, garage sales, and used book stores--though here and now, shelved spine out, she probably must stare, in the dark, at the back cover of Fowles's The Magus or The Collector. (Or E.M. Forster's A Room With a View?)

Because Fowles's novels are so rich and involving, so complete an immersion into a universe intricately designed and created, I have hesitated to view the film version--until I've read the novel. I wanted my experience of this novel--especially this novel--to be unsullied, uninfluenced by another's vision.

And, indeed, 4/5 of the way through the novel, Charles Smithson's 1867 England, and Victoria's world and empire as reflected through his eyes and soul, is fully created, revealed in pieces exactly as delivered, piece by exquisite piece, at the pace and in the order prescribed by Fowles when he wrote FLW in 1969.

But each time I sit down and open the book, and finish a chapter and close it, I am faced with Meryl's face.

Don't get me wrong, I completely understand why the publisher must use the film's imagery to tie in with the new edition. Marketing must resonate with the mind of the consumer, and Streep was already a star in 1981.

And she was undoubtedly well cast(1) for the role of Sarah Woodruff.

It has been nearly 40 years since I read The Lord of the Rings. Another rich world and universe, twice created, cast, and played--first by Tolkien, then by me. And by each enthralled reader of this wonderful trilogy.

Of course, when Peter Jackson, a director of horror films, cast Elias Wood in the leading role of Frodo, communities of readers (talk about a book that has many lives!!) revolted.

After that first film The Fellowship of the Ring, came out, the clamor about casting quelled. And I agree, the film was well cast, given the sacrifices that any film must make in transforming written vision to screen. Yet, for me, and I suspect many others, Hobbits cannot be adequately portrayed by humans.

Hobbits aren't simply small humans with hairy feet and pointed ears. They're another species. Their proportions and faces are different.

Yet, having seen the film, now, in my mind, it's difficult to not see Frodo as Wood.

When I went on vacation, I wanted to immerse myself in a good read, yet a thought-provoking read. I wanted to read Fowles.

When I picked up my paperback of FLW, and looked at the cover, I briefly considered seeking out an older edition. A pre-Meryl version.

But that would be silly.

Still, I sort of wish I had ripped the cover off.

Nothing against Meryl, but I would have preferred to cast it myself.

Condensed is For Soup, Not Books....but then again...

We were--all four of us--quite pleased with the timeshare unit: 33rd Street beachfront, second floor, overlooking the paved beach walk, foreground to the wide clean yellow sand stretching to the rolling Virginia Beach breakers. A sofa foldout for the kids in the living room, cable TV with VCR and DVD, a separate bedroom for me and Mom, two little balconies--all pretty cozy (read "tight") but comfortable. A nice dwelling for a week by the ocean.

And then, I saw the books. Three shelves of them, all hardbacks. Total, about 5 feet of literature. Almost instantly, though, I realized what these were, from the formulaic sameness of the spines...the consistent 1.25- to 1.5-inch widths, the characteristic four stacked titles in gold-serif lettering on rectangular panels, and I felt the warning blink in my brain...

"Step away from the condensations...." 37 volumes, ranging from 1954 (Night of the Hunter & three more condensations) to 1999 (Rainbow Six & three more distilled works) holding something like 160 separate titles...

I had brought along books to read, of course. And somehow I always lug along more than I end up reading. But within a day, between bike rides on the beachwalk and times with toes in the sand contemplating the Atlantic breakers...kite flying and delivering family pizzas...I was drawn back to the bookshelf...

This all happened about a year ago, but I was prompted to dig this out of my vacation notes and blog it, because 1) condensation is a way a book gets a new life, and that's what this blog is about and 2) recently I've read some articles about condensations returning to popularity.

First, as I looked over the books, I saw the following titles I'd already read the full versions of (parentheses represent the year of the RD series they're published in):

To Kill a Mockingbird (1960)
Papillon ('70),
The Unexpected Mrs. Pollifax ('66)
Life With Father ('67)
The White Dawn ('71)
Love Story ('70)
Day of the Jackal ('72)
A Cry in the Night (read the condensation in RD, '83--hey, I was in the Peace Corps, no-doubt stuck on a weather-docked boat somewhere with nothing else to read)
Nathans Run ('96).

Some pretty good literature, some great page turners, some unforgettable adventure. Pretty good company.

It was partly because of my memories of these reads that I told my self, "Just one..." and laid aside my Bill Bryson, temporarily.

So I dusted off a 1958 volume, and selected a western. The Diamond Hitch by Frank O'Rourke. A gritty "present day" (1950s) western. It was very good. A young guy trying to make it in rodeo in Wyoming. Not a western in the "legendary" sense, not an "Old West" western. More realistic, more modern. Not at all hollywood or disneyesque (well, maybe just a smidge disneyoid.)

Then, in rapid succession, I read
Rose by Martin Cruz Smith.
Prospect by Bill Littlefield.
The Young Elizabeth by Jennette & Francis Letton.
And a Formula Spy Thriller by a spy thriller formulist whose name I can't remember either.

Rose wasn't bad. Best part of it was its historical background, child- and female- labor in English coal mines century before last. Smith and I go way back. Meaning, me as a reader, Smith as a writer. In the 70s, when he was plain Martin Smith, he wrote an alternate history titled The Indians Won. It may have been his first novel, and it wasn't very good. But he got better, much better, didnt he?

The Young Elizabeth was quite good. As in Queen Elizabeth, the Liz the Q1, the one with Essex and Cousin Mary of Scots and all. She had to get wise quickly, grow up, figure out how to survive in a vicious royal succession minefield milieu.

But reading condensations is like singlehandedly eating a bag of Cheetos. Tasty and satisfying at first. Then, by the time I got to the cheesy minor-league Prospect and the crime/spy/thriller, I'd had enough light crunchy goodness. I couldn't stop, of course, just like with Cheetos.

So, if you come upon three or four feet of these abbreviated books, don't step away from the condensations. Choose carefully, and you will likely find something you'll really like.

***

Topic for Discussion:

Beyond Reader's Digest Condensations, should there be more condensations, for a world that moves at a faster pace, for shorter attention spans? (Orion Books is condensing the classics!)

Better yet, maybe the Utne Reader, which I've always thought of as RD for progressive thought, should start offering condensations, picking from the more unique and quirky fringes of book publishing.

Hey, the Old Books blog has some Creative Ways of Using Readers Digest Condensed Books... 

Books Are More Interesting Than Ever...

At a time when people have less and less time to read, when the tide of literacy seems to be stalling, perhaps even beginning to ebb, when the internet, still in its infancy really, seems to be metamorphosing once again, this time shedding its textual skin, perhaps completely, and evolving ever more toward the graphical, the audible, the vidible...

Yet, books are getting better than ever. The written word is more exciting, more available, more democratic, more widespread, more expressive, in more niches, delivering more riches, and expanding into more minds than ever before.

While small bookstores are sputtering, and the megabarns that sell books have become entertainment and caffeine clubs, and libraries are losing funding, and big publishers have cut imprints and staff and creative departments and marketing budgets, and half of the used bookstores that used to pepper my area are gone.

New authors are thriving. They’re publishing their own work, or publishing on Lulu or Ipublish or Iuniverse or the 168 other vanity and POD and PQN services.

And then there’s Oprah…

In this web of publishing contradiction, this mix of positive and negative, this crazy quilt of wonder and information and fascination that the internet and information explosion has made of the fields of books and authors and publishing, I, W. Town Andrews Jr. am going to write about the new lives of books.

Books have websites and blogs and podcasts and festivals and panels and roundtables and conferences and talks and readings and review sites and review discussion sites and wikis and television shows and movies and more…..

We are entering a time when one can love books, live books, eat, breathe and sleep books…………without ever opening or reading a book!!!

The UnheardofBooks.com Books Beyond Print Blog is about these new ways of enjoying and interacting with the book world. Beyond print, beyond reading.

Books aren’t just books anymore.