Word: coover
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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...only gave it a name, when he called his reportorial In Cold Blood a "nonfiction novel." Alex Haley called Roots a work of "faction," blending fact and fiction, but the distinction wasn't made all that clear on TV, embarrassing Haley deeply. Far more tricky legally is Robert Coover's new novel about the Rosenbergs, The Public Burning, where real-name living people (including Richard Nixon) are put into wildly improbable situations. If suits occur, it's not at all clear that the courts will give a novel the protection they give the press, against suits...
...Coover clearly has more on his mind than a malodorous vendetta. Long stretches of his novel read like a fretful imitation of James Joyce's Ulysses. The author lays out thousands of facts about the early 1950s, in general, and June 17-19, 1953, in particular-from Justice William O. Douglas' last-minute order of a stay of execution to the electrocution itself. He quotes extensively (and with considerable repetition) from the Rosenbergs' trial transcripts and their prison letters, President Eisenhower's speeches, contemporary issues of TIME (which becomes a character mockingly called the "National Poet...
...Ulysses, Joyce's catalogue of facts cohered into a unifying myth., Coover's myth requires the diminution of historical figures into pasteboard grotesques; since that much is clear on the novel's opening pages, Coover's torrent of trivia seems like so much padding along the way to a foregone conclusion. He cannot resist parading his data: a nickname is provided for every U.S. President through Truman, and Betty Crocker, like a public address announcer, introduces the 96 U.S. Senators by name at the execution. He also likes to show off his literary ingenuity...
...character named Richard Nixon narrates nearly every other chapter in the novel, where the best and worst in Coover's method coexist with greatest strain. His portrait of an ambitious, insecure and privately obsessed public man is remarkably comprehensive and even moving. If only the character were not named Nixon, all would be well. But Coover allows no distinction between his fiction and the living man; much of the humor depends on a knowledge of the real Nixon's career. As the fictional Nixon's humiliations increase (he is made to appear seminude in front...
...central weakness of The Public Burning can be traced to Coover's attempt to illuminate extremes by making them more extreme. The Rosenbergs' trial and execution were a passionate chapter in an overheated era. Even now, 24 years after their deaths, questions about the couple's guilt or innocence quickly grow heated. Manias stalked the land in the "50s; public and private life had the quality of a Manichaean morality play. Coover knows this, presents all the evidence, and then denies his book the ability to touch hearts or minds instead of nerves. What might have been...