Who Deconstructed Adam Snell?
BOOK A Novel. By Robert Grudin. 251 pp. New York: Random House. $19. ONE of the principal contributions of the recent literary theory boom — if it is a contribution — has been the dethronement of the sovereignty of authorship and the revelation of the status of texts as unstable entities. Bearing this in mind, one could say that the prankishness of Robert Grudin’s “Book: A Novel” begins with its title. “Book” is a solid Anglo-Saxon thump of a syllable, all dignity and durability. But no sooner do we crack the covers on this one than we find ourselves aswim in the waters of indeterminacy. I mean that “Book: A Novel” is, wittily and self-consciously, a text. And a text, as we know from Roland Barthes and others, is a tapestry (from the Latin textum, “a thing woven”), a decentered locus in which the author takes a back seat to the polymorphous play of language. Mr. Grudin, who teaches English at the University of Oregon and is the author of two works of nonfiction, “The Grace of Great T
