Word: coover
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: all
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
...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...
...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...