Conundrum: A Story About Reading

Conundrum:A Story About Reading Peter LaSalle (bio) Reality doesn't exist, time doesn't exist, personality doesn't exist. God was the omniscient author, but he died; now no one knows the plot, and since our reality lacks the sanction of a creator, there's no guarantee as to the authenticity of the received version. —Ronald Sukenick 1 This has to do with books, and reading, too. You see, I was walking at night in the dream, a book in my hands. 2 Or, more exactly, I had a dream about the original hardbound of Rabbit Redux, the John Updike novel, and then there was also the whole thing with the sadness of my recently deceased brother-in-law Bill to complicate it all, what this is really about. 3 You know, Rabbit Redux, the second in the Rabbit series of four books that examine the protagonist Rabbit Angstrom's life at ten-year or so intervals in contemporary American history. And, if you remember, all the original jackets for the hardbounds more or less matched (or three did), working on a rather mechanical geometric pattern of repeated thin horizontal stripes, the cover for Rabbit Redux maybe the most successful of the series to use that motif. The stripes there alternated red, white, and blue, with an inserted central circle of more stripes staggering the overall pattern, the title and author's name in bold white on black within; up in one corner hangs a perfectly round moon—one half shadowy, the other lit and showing the luminous craggy gray of the lunar surface. It was most appropriate, as the novel does find Updike's ex-high school basketball star, Rabbit, separated from his wife now in 1969 and working in a cluttered linotype print shop with his father and soon turning his tacky little tract house into more or less an impromptu four-person commune. It becomes the home to a runaway flower-child in a Porsche and a pretty crazed Vietnam-vet black power activist shouting the automatic, but always effectively searing, slogans of the day, with Rabbit's confused thirteen-year-old son, who Rabbit [End Page 95] is now raising on his own, alternatingly scared of then fascinated with the guy. That's the plot in simplest terms, yet on another level the book sometimes can come across as a probing commentary on the entire sixties era, the cover itself a good indication of that. The ominously staggered bands of specifically red, white, and blue in the design certainly do echo the essence of the time, when the very idea of America was in flux; back then the once-traditional patriotic stripes did get staggered, all right, and capping off the turbulent decade was definitely the metaphysical sight (vision?) of human beings clomping around on the moon in silvery space suits and planting a stiffened American flag somewhere out there in the starry blackness of what you might call the forever of the universe, surely a good indication of how small the confused, thoroughly indulgent country of ours truly was in 1969, when considered in the much larger scheme of galactic time and said ever-expanding universe. Actually, I think I once heard that John Updike designed his book covers himself, which makes sense. I mean, after he finished Harvard, coming there as a shy, gangly Pennsylvania high school kid on academic scholarship (with a nervous stammer, apparently), a guy who dazzled everybody with his brilliance on two fronts as an undergrad, both literary and artistic, he, already a proficient cartoonist, graduated summa cum laude (reportedly an uncommon feat at all-male Harvard in those days before grade inflation, no more than a handful of students in each class), to then go on for a year of study at the Ruskin School of Art at Oxford. That he completed such study was a fact I admittedly knew only because it was always included in the short biography of the author that Knopf would insert on the last page of their hardbounds along with "A Note on the Type"—i.e., "The text of this book was set in Janson" and the rest of that...