Word: coover
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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...ROBERT COOVER 534 pages. Viking...
Author Robert Coover, 45, is not a household name, unless the house happens to be a college dormitory. An on-and-off teacher, Coover has won a campus reputation as an avant-gardist who can do with reality what a magician does with a pack of cards: shuffle the familiar into unexpected patterns. Devotees religiously pass along The Universal Baseball Association, Inc., an eerie tale of a recluse who invents and maintains an eight-team baseball league and the lives of hundreds of players. First editions of his first novel (The Origin of the Brunists) and a collection of short...
...anonymity is about to end. Controversy, if not quality, bids fair to make The Public Burning a major publishing event. An excerpt from the novel that ran last fall in American Review alerted readers to its incendiary subject: the June 19, 1953, execution of Ethel and Julius Rosenberg. In Coover's fiction, the convicted atomic bomb spies are transferred from the death house at Sing Sing to a public stage in Times Square for their execution. Word began circulating that several publishers had considered the manuscript and decided not to risk legal repercussions. The question naturally arose: What...
...Coover's 534-page opus hangs-and strangles-on a premise that might have sustained a passable college skit. Uncle Sam and the Phantom (i.e., Communism) are engaged in a life-and-death struggle for control of the world. Sam was doing swell at the end of World War II, but it is now 1953, and the Phantom possesses, among other things, mainland China and the atomic bomb. The Rosenbergs, tried and found guilty of helping the enemy get the bomb, must be exorcised as spectacularly as possible so that the light from their electrocution can combat the Phantom...
...Coover's approach to the Rosenbergs' executions stems from a particularly heavyhanded variety of political satire that flourished in the 1960s: in Paul Krassner's magazine the Realist, for example, and hi Barbara Garson's play MacBird! Political figures, so the paranoia goes, are fair game. It is assumed in this genre that the most scabrous inventions can be brandished publicly and still fall short of the awful truth. Coover handles the rather limited demands of this artless form with ease. Those who are amused by gross fantasy will find much to admire in The Public...