Word: coover
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...have been here before. George Plimpton humiliated himself with the pros. Roger Angell has described a pitcher standing on a "hill like (a) sunstruck archaeologist at Knossos." John Updike, Ring Lardner, Philip Roth, Mark Harris, Robert Coover and other "serious" writers have regarded baseball as a metaphor for the human predicament. What can a puffing 56- year-old add to the overloaded shelf of belles lettres on the summer game...
...William Saroyan play, Love's Old Sweet Song, offered a character who sold TIME subscriptions and reinforced his pitch by reciting the euphonious glories of the magazine's masthead ("Carlton J. Balliett Jr., Robert Cantwell, Laird S. Goldsborough . . ."). In 1977 an angry protest novel by Robert Coover, The Public Burning, described TIME, ironically, as the national poet laureate. In a current Broadway musical, My One and Only, the hero dreams of being on the cover of TIME. In a recent song Billy Joel is more ambiguous...
...novel The Public Burning, Robert Coover satirized the myth from the mordant angle of Watergate America: "Throughout the solemn unfolding of the American miracle, men have noticed this remarkable phenomenon: what at the moment seems to be nothing more than the random rise and fall of men and ideas, false starts and sudden brainstorms, erratic bursts of passion and apathy, brief setbacks and partial victories, is later discovered to be-in the light of America's gradual unveiling as the New Athens, New Rome and New Jerusalem all in one -an inevitable sequence of interlocking events, a divine code...
...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...
...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...