Word: coover
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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...
...PROBABLY fair to say that the Novel came out of the sixties less dead than it came in. For the most part, that was thanks to the experimentation of people like Pynchon, William Gass, John Barth, Donald Barthelme and Robert Coover who were busy providing a set of new literary forms aching for new literary content. And now, just in the past year or so, two novels have appeared that make glimmer the hope that the old Genre might be back on her feet before long. Gravity's Rainbow, when it is working, is one of these, Updike's Rabbit...
...Weed Factor ushered in a new vein of American fiction in the early and middle sixties including Pynchon's V. Heller's Catch-22, and Coover's The Origin of the Brunists. What these works all share is an abiding contempt for the boundaries of traditional realism and traditional notions of seriousness. The example of the early moderns, Joyce in particular, had been terrifying. In a novel like Ulysses, the most incidental details were somehow necessary. Instead of trying to compete on these terms, the novelists of the sixties rejected such lofty ambitions and produced fiction where everything was superfluous...