Book Review : BOOK: A Novel, <i> By Robert Grudin (Random House: $19; 257 pp.)</i>

“Book” is a blast. Highly energized, intelligent, and funny, it ranks almost up there with David Lodge’s classic comedies, “Small World” and “Changing Places.” What’s more, it’s satire from start to finish, a tricky form, as most folks want their literary cocktail served straight up and don’t react well to ridicule--even when they’re clued in to what’s being ridiculed.

“Book” (the title that may sound generic but has at least two meanings here) takes publishers, academics and, specifically, literary theorists for a brain-rattling, stomach-churning ride. Most of the characters in this novel, from the acting college president to the big-shot New York publisher, get a dressing down for their posturing, politicking and pettiness.

Robert Grudin, the author of two previous nonfiction books, had a lot of fun writing this book--or if he didn’t it certainly reads as if he had and that’s what counts. Breaking up a straight-forward narrative, he inserts dramatic dialogue, journal entries and newspaper articles, like the following, which spells the victim’s name wrong: “The riot continued with the discovery of Adam Sneel, a University of Washagon English Professor who had disappeared on Tuesday. Sneel, who was injured by a projectile during the riot, is being treated at Mother of God Hospital for dehydration, malnutrition, cuts, abrasions, confusions, double jaundice, pneumonia, anemia, a skull fracture and a broken leg. He is not expected to survive.” We also get fantastic dictionary entries like: “defication: deconstructionalist term implying a connection between writing fiction and defecation.”

Grudin’s publisher’s copy claims that he has sewn into the fabric of “Book” “parodies of at least 17 separate literary forms.” I can’t identify them all but it doesn’t matter; “Book” works quite well for any reader hungry for a good, smart adventure spiced with high-class burlesque.

As “Book” opens, its hero, Adam Snell, ( this is how you spell it) a member of Washagon’s English Department, and author of “Sovrana Sostrata,” a novel “that somehow offended colleagues from every ideological camp, a book that fortunately was a commercial flop,” has disappeared. The eponymous heroine of Snell’s novel, herself a novelist, turns out stuff like this: “Some think that the most horrible thing in the world is atheism; others that it is incest; still others, that it is genocide. But data confirms that, for the majority, it is the existence of a younger sibling.”

One of Snell’s colleagues, along with a local detective, fear foul play--”People didn’t just disappear; they disappeared in order to reappear as corpses.” English professor Glanda Gazza, a person bristling with feminist zeal, and appraised by the acting college president as “illustrious scholar, swashbuckling administrator, and latent sexpot,” is delighted to have the politically incorrect Snell out of the picture. In fact, she manages to secure the support of enough craven colleagues to “wreak institutional vengeance upon him.”

Snell is eventually found, battered and near death, in a large untended patch of genetically engineered weeds. The villain of the piece is Frank Underwood, a paranoid deconstructionist who “had considered growing a beard, but decided that his own beard, which was dark, would type him with the homosexuals, Jews, ethnic busybodies and other odd types who clustered in such profusion at the university.” Underwood is bent on committing “libricide” (that is, destroying every last copy of Snell’s novel) and murdering its author. Purely by chance, a brainy and beautiful editor from a New York publishing house reads Snell’s problematic novel and decides to re-publish it, partly to balance a list dominated by such noxious products as “Melons, Meditation, and Wellness” by Raj Bhor Poona, M.D., ‘with’ (that unsinkable hack) Percy Glickstein, a fledgling blockbuster which, replete with its dynamic ‘Five-Melon Diet’ and its breath-catching spiritual counsel that we should all “emulate the wisdom of the fruit,” was bound to take a large bite out of the inexhaustible wellness market.” Snell recovers, meets the editor; they hit it off but she must return to the Big City.

After a false start on a defective aircraft--”Someone turned on the P.A. and left it on, staticky, chaotic. Then the captain, who sounded on the verge of swallowing his own tongue, said ‘We’re going back,’ turned off the P.A. and went into a steep bank”--Snell lands in New York, meets up with his beloved and helps track down Underwood. Glanda Gazza, meanwhile has met her comeuppance when she looses her job: “ . . . she shouldered past two secretaries who wanted to speak to her, slammed her office door, savagely smashed her heavy bag against the books that lined her wall . . . and sprawled across her desk, sobbing heavily.”

Of course the plot is absurd--that’s what satire is all about. The author spins a tale not to convince his readers that something “really happened” but to score provocative and dramatic points against the flaws in human nature. What’s striking in this satire is that while some of it may seem exaggerated, a lot of it--in light of the recent slanging matches over what should and should not be taught at the college level--seems positively tame.

While Grudin’s targets are fresh, his method is time-honored (he acknowledges his debt to Rabelais and Swift, among others). Satire is a special and, let’s face it, rarefied taste--the caviar of prose forms and “Book” will probably be labeled by a few sore-heads as a tour de force , a definite put-down in litcrit circles. And not a few heavy-duty feminists will no doubt object to some of the women in this novel. But as a bristling feminist myself, I can recommend “Book” as a genuinely original work, the creation of a passionate man. P.S. Don’t read the last chapter--it’s superfluous and confusing.