Robert Coover Archives | Numéro Cinq

Living in a Story | Review of Huck Out West by Robert Coover — Daniel Green

Jun 042017

Huck Out West picks up Huckleberry Finn’s adventures after he has indeed headed out to the territories and taken up a life as an itinerant in the American West. Essentially a drifter, Huck in this way fulfills the destiny inherent to his character as depicted in The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, where he is content to float his way down the Great River to no particular destination beyond a loosely defined “freedom.” —Daniel Green

Huck Out West
Robert Coover
W. W. Norton, 2017
320 pages; $26.95

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Robert Coover has been a presence on the American literary scene for over 50 years now. In many ways, the critical response to each new book he publishes continues to register the perception that he remains an adventurous writer who repeatedly offers challenges to convention, a perception in which Coover himself must take considerable satisfaction, as he is indeed one of the most consistently audacious and inventive of the first generation postmodernists his work partly represents. Coover’s novels and stories subvert both the abiding myths and shibboleths—sometimes outright lies—that animate American history, and the formal assumptions of literary storytelling, often by adopting the ostensible conventions of such storytelling but subjecting them to a kind of straight-faced parody. In his new novel, Huck Out West, Coover turns to such a strategy, in this case not simply mimicking the patterns or manner of an inherited narrative form, but creating a new and extended version of a specific, already existing work—a sequel, but one intended to provoke reflection on the earlier work’s cultural implications and its literary authority.

Coover has drawn on the elemental power of stories and storytelling going back to his first novel, The Origin of the Brunists, as well as the story collection Pricksongs and Descants, the latter including such stories as “The Door,” “The Gingerbread House,” and “The Magic Poker,” all of which invoke fairy tales and fables as both form and subject. Coover is one of the central figures in the rise of what came to be called “metafiction,” but where, say, John Barth wrote in books like Lost in the Funhouse a blatantly self-reflexive kind of story that proclaims its own fabrication, Coover dramatized the conditions of fiction-making allegorically, making storytelling itself the story. This is perhaps best illustrated in his novel The Universal Baseball Association, still arguably his best book and the most revealing of his fundamental preoccupations as a writer. The novel’s protagonist, J. Henry Waugh (JH Waugh), is the God-like creator of a fictional world that is ostensibly a make-believe baseball league but that de facto represents an alternative reality in which Henry can emotionally and intellectually invest apart from his unsatisfying and humdrum job as an accountant. Indeed, his investment in this reality becomes so all-encompassing that at the novel’s conclusion it would seem he has disappeared into it—albeit as the now withdrawn and omniscient deity who contemplates his creation without intervention.

Although a book like The Public Burning, probably Coover’s best-known and most controversial work, would not at first seem to feature the same sort of concerns informing The Universal Baseball Association—it is, after all, a novel about weighty issues related to politics and history, not about an obscure accountant dreaming his life away—but in fact The Public Burning is not really about politics and history—not directly, at least—but politics as representation, and the distorting effects the sensationalized and distorted forms of representation in America have on American history and culture. In both UBA and The Public Burning, we are shown how easily, even eagerly, human beings shape reality into fictions and subsequently insist on taking those fictions as reality, with predictably disastrous consequences. J. Henry Waugh exemplifies individually what American culture at large evidences more generally: the desire to refashion a recalcitrant reality into a simple, more manageable creation, in which we must force ourselves to believe or that repressed reality will disagreeably return.

A novel like The Public Burning eludes designation as a strictly “political” novel—and thus avoids seeming a dated artifact of a fading Cold War controversy—because it is not finally a representation of the Rosenberg case per se but a representation of the representations to which the Rosenberg case and its legacy have been submitted, an evocation of American depravity through the discursive forms—exemplified by the New York Times and Time magazine—and manufactured imagery—embodied in “Uncle Sam”—that shape and circulate the specific content of that depravity. If J. Henry Waugh retreats into his private invented reality to fill his own inner (and outer) void, in The Public Burning the emptiness is felt as a social loss, an absence of meaning, to be counteracted through the invented reality provided by Media myths and fantasies, myths that at their most destructive must be reinforced through the ritualized spectacle into which the Rosenbergs’ death is organized.

Since The Public Burning, Coover has published numerous, consistently lively works of fiction of various length (8 novels, including the mammoth sequel to The Origin of the Brunists, The Brunist Day of Wrath, 7 novellas, and 3 collections of short fiction). While these books never seem repetitive, they do return to a few obviously fruitful subjects—sports, fairy tales, movies—and can certainly be taken as continued variations on the self-reflexive strategies introduced in Pricksongs and Descants, Universal Baseball Association, and The Public Burning. At times this strategy is more muted, as in Gerald’s Party, which seems more purely an exercise in surrealism, while in other books the artifice is unconcealed, directly integrated into plot and setting, as in The Adventures of Lucky Pierre, one of Coover’s most underrated books that dramatizes the plight of a character caught in an ongoing fiction from which he cannot seem to escape, a fictional character aware of his own fictionality.

Coover has also produced a series of novel and novellas that foreground their own fictionality by presenting themselves as versions of a particular mode or genre of fiction. Dr. Chen’s Amazing Adventure is Coover’s take on science fiction. Ghost Town is a western, while Noir evokes the hard-boiled detective novel (as filtered through film noir). Such works could not exactly be categorized as pastiche, since they are not so much imitations as efforts to distill the genre to its most fundamental assumptions and most revealing practices. Nor could they really be called parodies, since the goal is not so much to spoof or ridicule the genre but to in a sense turn it inside out, make it disclose the specific ways a particular mode of storytelling lends its conventions toward motifs and typologies that in turn have worked to substitute themselves for the actualities those conventions were created to depict, preventing anything resembling a clear perception of historical and cultural actualities apart from these archetypal representations. In novels such as Pinocchio in Venice and now Huck Out West, Coover takes this strategy of metafictional mimicry a step farther by seizing upon a specific iconic text and reworking it, both as a kind of homage to the prior work but also to create a parallel text that echoes the original while it also sounds out the work’s tacit if partly concealed assumptions and elaborates on its latent if unspoken implications.

Huck Out West picks up Huckleberry Finn’s adventures after he has indeed headed out to the territories and taken up a life as an itinerant in the American West. Essentially a drifter, Huck in this way fulfills the destiny inherent to his character as depicted in The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, where he is content to float his way down the Great River to no particular destination beyond a loosely defined “freedom.” If the objective in Huckleberry Finn for both Huck and his friend Jim (who seeks literal freedom from bondage) is obstructed through the auspices of Tom Sawyer, likewise in Huck Out West Tom causes his supposed best friend (“pards,” they call each other) mostly trouble for their friendship—in fact, in Huck Out West Tom threatens to hang Huck, an act only the most naïve reader would believe he does not intend to carry out. Tom, who literally rides back into Huck’s life (a little over halfway into the novel) on a white horse, again proves unreliable and self-serving, although in Huck Out West these character traits, which Coover has keenly abstracted from the portrayal of Tom in Twain’s novel, are much more deadly in their potential consequences (not only to Huck) than when expressed by Tom Sawyer the 12-year-old boy.

Before Tom makes his reappearance and ultimately sends Huck off on the same kind of open-ended adventure that concludes The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, Huck brings us up to date on his life since his journey down the river, which includes riding along with Tom for the Pony Express. After Tom decides to head back east, nothing really captures Huck’s interest long enough for him stay in any one place, so when the novel’s present action begins he has settled into the life of a wanderer:

When [Tom] left, I carried on like before, hiring myself out to whosoever, because I didn’t know what else to do, but I was dreadful lonely. I wrangled horses, rode shotgun on coaches and wagon trains, murdered some buffaloes, worked with one or t’other army, fought some Indian wars, shooting and getting shot at, and didn’t think too much about any of it. I reckoned if I could earn some money, I could try to buy Jim’s freedom back, but I warn’t never nothing but stone broke.

Huck must decide whether to buy Jim’s freedom because shortly after heading west, Tom Sawyer consigned Jim back to slavery by selling him to a band of Cherokee Indians. Huck is regretful about this decision, but does not look for Jim after all. Eventually Huck does serendipitously encounter Jim, who has indeed attained his freedom and is now traveling with a wagon train of settlers that Huck is hired to guide. He has become a devout Christian and forgives Huck for apparently abandoning him, but this is the last we see of Jim in Huck Out West. It is on the one hand disappointing that Coover chooses not to engage with the specific racial issues raised by The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn (as John Keene does in his updating of the novel in his book Counternarratives), but on the other hand, he does in effect transfer the theme of white American treatment of racial and ethnic minorities to the eliminationist campaign against Native Americans during the post-Civil War migration to the western “territories.” This campaign is represented most directly in the character of Custer (“General Hard Ass,” as Huck refers to him), but the historical forces portrayed in all of the novel’s actions converge around a broad account of a rapacious, mercenary America determined to extend its sovereignty over all the land it can exploit, with little regard for the devastation and suffering this expansion leaves in its wake.

Ultimately Huck Out West does mirror the Huck/Jim relationship of Huckleberry Finn in Huck’s pairing with a Lakota tribesman, Eeteh, who shares with Huck a general disinclination to bear down and work hard, preferring his own kind of independence, but who is nevertheless an adept storyteller in the Lakota tradition and regales Huck with tales about the trickster figure, Coyote. It is Eeteh who directs Huck to the Black Hills in order to elude General Hard Ass, whom Huck fears wants him imprisoned, or worse, for refusing an order, even though Huck was serving only as a civilian scout. Thus Huck finds himself living in a teepee in Deadwood Gulch, a pristine creek valley when Huck arrives but soon transformed into a muddy slough overrun with prospectors, their hangers-on, and all the hastily constructed buildings erected when gold is discovered. It is into this suddenly chaotic place that Tom Sawyer arrives as well, allegedly deputized by the federal government to bring order. What Tom really seeks to do in Deadwood Gulch is seize the main chance, to use it as the opportunity for the same sort of self-aggrandizement that is always Tom Sawyer’s ultimate motivation.

Huck can never quite accept this, even after Tom has threatened to hang him for defying Tom’s wishes. Rescued from Tom’s bluster by Eeteh (who brings along a few Lakota warriors for good measure), Huck replies to Tom’s predictable apology: “You’re my pard, Tom, always was. But it ain’t tolerable here for me no more. If you want to ride together again, come along with us now.” Tom demurs, and Huck rides off with Eeteh, but in this case lighting out for a territory more informed by Eeteh’s spontaneous, generally elastic storytelling than by the “stretchers” told by Tom, lies he tries to believe are true—or tries to convince others they should believe. Huck himself has earlier indicated he already understands the difference between Tom’s stories that hide reality and the kind of story that might be truer to Huck’s sense of reality: “Tom is always living in a story he read in a book so he knows what happens next, and sometimes it does. For me it ain’t like that. Something happens and then something else happens, and I’m in trouble again.”

Huck Out West is not as purely a picaresque narrative as The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, but Coover has certainly captured the nomadic state of Huck Finn’s soul. He has cannily discerned the essential nonconformity manifest in the character created by Mark Twain, and memorably transformed the adolescent’s lack of ambition into a more self-aware skepticism toward social expectations and cultural practices—while still preserving in Huck an ingenuous outlook that acknowledges what the world is like but remains free of malice or resentment. This quality is reflected in the colloquial eloquence of Huck’s narrative voice, which again Coover has adapted from the same quality found in Twain’s novel but has further developed into what may be the most impressive accomplishment in Huck Out West. Huck doesn’t merely sound “authentic”; his idiomatic expressiveness is sustained throughout the novel less to provide “color” than to establish Huck as a character able to render his circumstances persuasively through the integrity of his verbal presence.

If I did develop one reservation about Huck Out West while reading it, it was from the invocation of Custer as Huck’s bete noire and scourge of the West. This move threatens to make the novel too reminiscent of Thomas Berger’s Little Big Man, whose narrator also relates his peripatetic adventures in the Old West in a vernacular-laden voice. Perhaps this only indicates how much Berger himself may have been influenced by Huckleberry Finn, and the work of Mark Twain in general, but Berger’s Jack Crabb is primarily the means by which the novel effects its darkly comic burlesque of American myth-making. Huck Out West engages in its fair share of this sort of lampoonery as well, but ultimately it goes farther. Robert Coover provides a new version of the twice-told tale offering a radical representational strategy that still allows for dynamic storytelling, even as it interrogates its own process of representation.

—Daniel Green

Daniel Green is a writer and literary critic whose essays, reviews, and stories have appeared in a variety of publications. He is the author of Beyond the Blurb: On Critics and Criticism (2016).

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Dream Eaters of the Apocalypse: A Review of Robert Coover’s The Brunist Day of Wrath — Natalie Helberg

Apr 022014

The Brunist Day of Wrath reflects a decade’s worth of labour and attention; it is a book that should, and does, take time to read, a book that, through mysterious means, nonetheless feels pressed on by some urgency. It seems feverish—serious and self-committed—though it is also pun-funny and clever-funny, daffy and delirious. And yet its eye, casting itself around like a billiard ball, picking up small-town grit and gossip, is uneasy, and should be, for it is accountable for its thousand crimes, self-conscious of its own apocalyptic imaginings… —Natalie Helberg

The Brunist Day of Wrath
Robert Coover
Dzanc Books
1100 pages, $30.00
ISBN: 978-1938604386

Robert Coover’s The Brunist Day of Wrath is a boisterous, bloody, jaw-dropping, awe-inspiring—for any writer, humbling—sometimes painfully, but always expertly, protracted ride. Countless characters and their countless voices well up out of its thousand pages, mingling as subplots crisscross and ramify: Cultists clash with the local and power-laden in a high-profile scrimmage for property; cult benefactors drain joint bank-accounts, screwing local, power-laden husbands out of their underpinning monies; skeptics balk, hoot, and forewarn; believers pray, persist together, at odds, or else, defecting, wail for reckoning; trailer-brats rapture cats; fathers disown sons and sons abandon fathers; signs are deciphered, then, ad hoc, re-deciphered; God is named, variously; musically-inclined yokels hit it big; an aspiring saint is gang-raped; demons are conceived, and, on a rooftop in the midst of a bloodbath to end bloodbaths, a murderous, evangelical biker is volatized by choppers.

The book before the book, The Origin of the Brunists, like the fictive doomsday cult whose origin it catalogues, begins with light. An explosion. Confused prose conveys its confused wake: ‘There was light and / post drill leaped smashed the/turned over the whole goddamn car kicking / felt it in his ears, grabbed his bucket, and turned from the face.’ Light: Two shadows, miners, duck out of sight; a cigarette in a small earthen chamber disintegrates the next instant. Gas. Light. Flame feeding flame. Black smoke furling into shafts, tunnels. Blocked passageways and rubble. The sentient shadows die. Or live. Many die. Most. Laboriously, for lack of oxygen. Singly and in groups. A message wrapped in a preacher’s fingers—stiff fingers—makes it to the surface. It prophesies the coming of light, the end of the world.

The accident at Deepwater No. 9 Coalmine, the essence of West Condon, ushers in the town’s demise, its economic and spiritual ruin. It gives rise to the Brunists, who inaugurate and so-name themselves so as to better await an end that, as livelihoods are lost and reputations are ruined, as sermons bubble forth alongside bar talk and smack talk, as lechers skulk to their lovers, and as poseurs pose to achieve base purposes, is endlessly deferred.

The Brunist Day of Wrath picks up here: Five years later, not much has changed. Those who lost everything in the first novel have lost or are in the process of losing more. The Brunists, having dispersed, gather once more in anticipation of the End’s anniversary (puzzling, they know). Only this time there are hellions: The children of the tyrannical Reverend Baxter—wife-beater, child-beater, convert but erstwhile Brunist nemesis #1—a man as fiery as the Book of Revelations itself—have grown up. Once friendly, neighbourhood terrorizers flaunting a charred human hand, eldest and youngest son are now cold-blooded gangsters. They bow to a ferocious god akin to that of the Old Testament (‘the Big One’) and, with a clutch of armed bikers—not Brunist-endorsed, though their tats are Brunist—not to mention with Nitro foraged from the abandoned mine site, plan to rev up, rip through and blitz West Condon.

Thus The Brunist Day of Wrath, like some horrible ouroboros, curls back to touch its origin: The mine explodes, ejecting prophecy—‘the Coming of the Light’—which, moving through a complicated chain of human intercessors, begets further explosion.

And yet there is a day beyond this day of wrath, an end beyond the end: an epilogue in which the novel becomes fully self-reflexive; this is a text about a writer, writing. It reminds us that The Brunist Day of Wrath, like most of Coover’s work, is largely preoccupied with signs and symbols, stories, story-forms and tropes. It is a book about the power they have over us, about the fact that they are human-generated, the fact that they rigidify around us in deleterious ways (or become crusty, as Coover says), and the even more momentous fact that they are tractable to invention: they can be appropriated and rejiggered; they can be wildly embellished upon.

Coover has devoted his art to shifting and embellishing upon them, partly by creating work that is self-interrogating (he is called a fabulist for this reason): In books like Briar Rose, in which an old crone subjects a sleeping beauty to innumerable variations on the eponymous tale, he creates the tale anew as a series of its own novel versions, and this despite the princess’s unremitting protestation (perhaps representative of a culture’s) that this is not how stories are told. But these stories, repeated, are both the dreams the child (culture) dreams and her waking reality; to not refashion them, to merely accept what has—for whatever corresponds, in real time, to Beauty’s 100-year slumber—been handed down, would be, for the crone, to risk sinking into ‘a sleep as deep’ as the princess inhabits: a dangerous, unnecessary, and even laughable automatism.

In Pricksongs and Descants, Coover uses a similar technique to refresh the short-story form; in, for example, “The Babysitter” from that collection, he varies a handful of scenarios across a series of short, disconnected paragraphs. The story is ‘modular’ in Madison Smartt Bell’s sense of the term: Key details are altered or swapped for reasonable facsimiles in corresponding paragraphs (text blocks): in one, the baby has asphyxiated on a diaper pin; in another, it is screaming; in another, she, the babysitter, strangles it; in still another, it is at the bottom of the bathtub, ‘not swimming or anything.’ Text blocks can corroborate or contradict one another; they ‘mean’ together paratactically, or resonate with more than follow from one another. Thus tone can shift from block to block, as can point of view; in fact anything, as Bell says, can happen.^[1]Variation, as a technique, is reflective of what Coover has called his wish to unpack a piece’s full range of possibilities, of an effort, as he puts it, ‘to explore the whole.’

Though The Brunist Day of Wrath has a realist quality uncharacteristic of some of Coover’s other work, it nevertheless preserves a drive toward narrative playfulness and the absurd. That being said, the book’s flights of fancy, unlike those in a work like Pricksongs and Descants, remain at all times recuperable by something like realism: It is not the case that anything can happen from, say, one free-floating text block to another: In fact, in both The Origin of the Brunists and The Brunist Day of Wrath, if we encounter something disjoined or surreal, this is likely because we are reading a character’s letter or journal entry. Similarly, Jesus, in the latter narrative, who has taken up residence in an apostate, cannot disappear into thin air; his presence, not to mention his bantering sacrilege, his fun, off-colour reasoning, can be explained using the real-world term ‘alter-ego’; he both is and isn’t a mere voice in a mind—a fact which doesn’t preclude carnal baptisms with members of his ex-congregation:

‘I’m ready to do anything for you,’ Prissy whispers, peeling down her leotards…She steps into the tub and kneels between his feet and commences to wash them, one at a time. And then she lifts them and kisses them. ‘You are so beautiful,’ she says. ‘You are the most beautiful man I have ever known.’ When she says this, she is gazing affectionately past his feet at his middle parts, which are beginning to stir as though in enactment of the day’s [Easter] legend. It is not hard to prophecy what will happen next. Is he being tested? Be anxious for nothing, Jesus says. As it is written, no temptation has overtaken you that is not common to man. She has a car, she can be helpful to us. I, too, have known the company of helpful women of dubious morals.

What is notable on a stylistic level about The Brunist Day of Wrath is the sheer excess of Coover’s prose (the paragraphs in this work sprawl), and, relatedly, the amount of detail packed into nearly every character imagined: These characters are full-bodied, notably unique—unique as any of us are, perhaps more—and very far from the stock figures that dominate so many of his other pieces: princesses and private eyes, dames and woodsmen, characters whose respective profiles are, understandably and likely intentionally, blank as a trope’s. In some ways, the work is working realism through excess—conventional realism, anyway, since, as a character points out, ‘The conventional way of telling stories is a kind of religion,’ of course ‘the true realists are the lens-breakers’; ‘[t]ight-assed little paragraphs laid out like snapshots in a photo album are not for me.’ If the project, then, does, to a certain extent, locate itself within, and limit itself to, realism, it does so in order re-locate, or push, realism’s very mode of telling. Perhaps this pushing of realism is the reason Jesus, in the text, remains at all times plausible (certifiable). Perhaps it is also the reason characters, not Coover, pen the work’s zaniest digressions.

The text’s catalogue of kinds of signs and symbols—its interest in how ideas, experiences and phenomena are encoded and translated—is another point of excess; it is likely not unrelated to Coover’s commitment to the text’s full (and, in this case, metaphoric) potential: Dreams, dances and gypsy cards pepper these pages; if they are interpretations themselves, they must again be interpreted. Mute stroke victims blink eyes as visitors suss out their communications. Two bible college drop-outs even attempt to reconstruct the history of the Brunist cult’s formation; they use newspapers, stories, pornographic photographs and tape-recordings—versions, in short, to create a newer version. The Origin of the Brunists itself is more or less translated into the sequel, where it is mediated by the other characters’ acts of retrospection: We get it a second time in mosaic form, each pane perspectival.

Though The Origin of the Brunists shares some of the above preoccupations, musing on similar themes, specifically on ‘messages’—there are messages everywhere: ambiguous messages which are therefore as meaningful as they are meaningless: ‘the spirits never [say] things plain’ and ‘sometimes, well, words can mean two things, that’s all’—it nevertheless refrains from insisting on a message. This is perhaps less true (but not untrue) of The Brunist Day of Wrath. While in true postmodern fashion, The Origin of the Brunists mobilizes contradictory voices, allowing perceptive renderings of devout thought-processes and those of the incredulous, mocking, opportunistic newspaper editor (and perhaps absurdist), Miller, to exist on par, The Brunist Day of Wrath cedes itself to Sally:

Sally is Miller—one of the few central characters not carried over into the sequel—re-envisioned. She is a skeptic, a wit and a writer, and, in the epilogue it is she who, self-taxed, writes a version of the apocalypse, as it was manifest in West Condon. This book within the book, mentioned in a chapter written so as to seem to reference—so as to riff off the existence of—The Brunist Day of Wrath, institutes, within the text, the spectre of the author (for one thing, Sally is advised to try her hand writing from a male perspective—she uses some biographical details, though changes others). In some ways, she seems to channel Coover, who was inspired to complete his novel after George W. Bush was elected: the fundamentalists rose up and terror with them (Coover says ‘Young Bush,’ writes ‘Young Baxter’). As Sally says, ‘It’s like people are caught up in a dangerously insane story and they don’t know how to get out of it…’

This is why Sally, like Coover, in her capacity as a writer, aspires to shred story, to mutate the domain of the interpreted and the interpretable, to maintain its fluidity, or eat dreams (so she puts it). For in her text-world, truth is no more than a mode of rendering; lies expressed in the correct mode become true and effective, while truths expressed as opinions are dismissed in court. Even beyond the courtroom, a slick simpleton garbles facts to tenderly manipulate the dying and a West Condon reprobate lies to himself long enough, and elaborately enough, to confect sweet, false memories. Perhaps the only thing Coover’s book insists upon is story’s ontological potency. The work teems with real-world significance precisely because it is a story about story.

The Brunist Day of Wrath reflects a decade’s worth of labour and attention; it is a book that should, and does, take time to read, a book that, through mysterious means, nonetheless feels pressed on by some urgency. It seems feverish—serious and self-committed—though it is also pun-funny and clever-funny, daffy and delirious. And yet its eye, casting itself around like a billiard ball, picking up small-town grit and gossip, is uneasy, and should be, for it is accountable for its thousand crimes, self-conscious of its own apocalyptic imaginings: ‘What’s the toll now from all this madness?’ Sally asks, answering, ‘You might say a story has killed them all.’^[2]

—Natalie Helberg

Natalie Helberg is from Edmonton, Alberta. Some of her experimental work has appeared on InfluencySalon.ca and in Canadian Literature. She recently completed an MFA in Creative Writing with the University of Guelph. She is working on a hybrid novel.

Footnotes (↵ returns to text)

Joel Katelnikoff quotes Bell’s Narrative Design in his dissertation SCROLL / NETWORK / HACK: A Poetics of ASCII Literature (1983-1989). He also suggests that Coover’s stories in Pricksongs and Descants are modular in design, though without discussing particular examples. ↵
See also an interview with Robert Coover on Numéro Cinq and readings and interviews at the University of Pennsylvania’s Pennsound.↵

Ovid, Kafka, Rabelais, Cervantes & Form: DG Interview with Robert Coover

Mar 212013

Here is an interview I did with Robert Coover in 1996 shortly after the publication of his novel John’s Wife. We were talking over the phone; the interview starts slowly as we feel each other out. But as it gathers steam Coover says marvelous things about his forerunners, Ovid, Kafka, Rabelais and Cervantes. He talks about how, when he planned the novel, he actually started with a paragraph count and the idea of a Bell curve. He also does a lovely reading of a passage — as he says, his first “telephone reading.”

This is from a raw tape that has been in a cardboard box for years; so my usual apologies for the sound quality.

Click the little triangular button to listen to the interview.

Coover Part 1

Coover Part 2

—Douglas Glover

See also interviews with Gordon Lish, John Hawkes & William Gass.

The Enemies of the Novel: DG Interview With John Hawkes
Causing Damage — Captain Fiction Redivivus: DG Interview With Gordon Lish
Limericks, Degraded Modernism and The Tunnel: DG Interview with William H. Gass

A Man Walks Into A Bar: Fiction — Kate Reuther

Mar 212012

Kate Reuther

A MAN WALKS INTO A BAR. He orders a beer and tries to pay with a five-dollar bill.

“You can’t use that here,” the bartender says.

“Why not?” the man says.

“Because this is a singles bar.”

“Very funny,” the man says, reaching for the glass.

A man walks into a bar. He sits down next to a blonde with a Pomeranian dog on the next stool. The man waves at the bartender who keeps polishing the taps.

“Does your dog bite?” the man asks.

“Never,” the blonde answers.

The man reaches out to pet the dog and the dog bites him. Hard.

“I thought you said your dog doesn’t bite!” the man says, wrapping his hand in a dirty dishtowel.

“He doesn’t,” the blonde replies. “That isn’t my dog.”

The man kicks the counter so the pint glasses ring. “Can I get a fucking beer over here?”

A man walks into a bar with a slab of asphalt under his arm. He places the asphalt on the stool beside him and flexes his red, ragged hands.

“What’ll it be?” the bartender says.

“A beer please, and one for the road.”

The bartender’s eyes flick to the clock on the wall.

“What?” the man says. “You’re not open?”

“I thought you were back at work,” the bartender says.

“I’m on break,” the man says. “Jesus, you’re worse than my wife.”

“Just take it easy today,” the bartender says, plunking down two frosty bottles.

“Yes, dear,” the man says.

A man walks into a bar and orders twelve shots of tequila.

“Go home, man,” the bartender says. “Your wife’s been calling every fifteen minutes.”

“I said twelve shots!” the man repeats. “Line ‘em up!”

The bartender starts pouring and the man pounds them as fast as he can. He doesn’t even taste the tequila anymore, although his eyes begin to water.

“Maybe you should slow down,” the bartender says. Most days he would argue that a man’s life is his own to do with as he pleases, but in this case there is the crying wife. Pregnant too. “Let me call you a cab.”

The man sways and knocks back another shot. “You’d be drinking too if you had what I have.”

“What’s that?” the bartender asks. Suffering follows this man like a hungry dog.

The man slurps the twelfth, amber glass. “Fifty cents.”

A man walks into a bar carrying a duck.

“Get that pig out of here!” the bartender shouts.

“It’s not a pig, you idiot!” the man replies. He staggers a little, although he’s only had two or three. The problem is the duck, which is surprisingly heavy.

The bartender reaches for the baseball bat under the counter. “I was talking to the duck.”

“I think we better go,” the duck says.

“I’ve got money today,” the man says, fumbling for his wallet. He splays it open with his free left hand. “Twenty bucks.”

The bartender grabs the wallet from the man’s outstretched fingers, extracts the Jackson, and tosses it back empty. The duck catches it in his beak.

“I’m gonna be nice and say this covers the mess you made last night,” the bartender says.

“But what about now?” the man says. “Just one beer?”

“Get the fuck out of here, pig,” the bartender says, patting the bat against his palm.

“Did you see that?” the man shouts. The other bar patrons stare decisively at their coasters. “He robbed me. You’re all witnesses!”

“Let’s just go,” the duck says through a mouthful of leather.

A man walks into a bar and orders a beer. It’s early, quiet — the air still smells of fresh Lysol over old piss.

“Nice shirt,” a voice chirps to his right.

The man turns, ready to bark that it’s a uniform, that he has to wear it or the manager will dock his pay, and a man’s got to earn for his wife and future child, even if it requires stuffing his gut into a lime-green Cellular Circus polo, but then he realizes there’s no one else sitting at the bar. He’s alone with the dishwasher-hot glasses and the fresh bowl of peanuts.

The man takes a long swig from his beer. He holds the cool bottle against his forehead.

“Nice pants,” the voice says.

The man swivels around on his stool, making the metal shriek. He looks left and right, behind him, under the seat, in back of the bar, but the only other customer, a giraffe, is busy feeding quarters into the cigarette dispenser. The man reaches for his beer with a shaking hand.

“Nice shoes,” the voice says.

“Shit,” the man says, knocking over his beer. The puddle rushes towards the edge of the bar and dribbles onto the man’s shoes, which are, in fact, cheap, imitation-leather penny-loafers, minus the pennies. When he takes them off at night, his socks are sweat-wet and brown.

“Everything all right?” the bartender says, coming over with a dirty towel.

“There’s this voice,” the man whispers. “It keeps making comments about my appearance.”

“Oh, that’s the nuts,” the bartender says, gesturing towards the plastic dish. “They’re complimentary.”

“Shit, if I wanted to talk to nuts, I could do that at home,” the man says.

“We were just trying to be nice,” the nuts say.

“So you were lying?” the man says. “You don’t like my shirt?” He grabs a handful from the bowl. The salt stings the cuts on his palms.

“It’s a very bright green,” the nuts say.

The man raises his fist towards his open mouth.

“Please,” the nuts say. “Don’t.”

“Say something nice about my teeth,” the man says, crunching the nuts between his molars. “Tell me about my beautiful tongue.”

A man walks into a bar with an alligator under his arm. Or rather, he tucks the spiky tail under his arm and drags the heavy, gray body behind him.

“Do you. . . . do you serve lawyers here?” the man asks. He can’t catch his breath. He misses the asphalt and the duck which, compared to the alligator, were light, compact, and good conversationalists. Maybe he can devise a harness for transporting the alligator. Maybe he can borrow the stroller until the baby is born.

“I’m sorry, man, but you’ll have to leave,” the bartender says. “Jacket and tie required.”

“Jacket and tie?” the man says. “Since when?”

“Since always,” the bartender says, hooking a thumb at a party of tuxedoed chickens shooting pool. A red hen makes a tough bank shot and the chickens cluck appreciatively.

“I’ll be right back,” the man says, heading for the door.

The alligator hisses.

“Hey, you can’t leave that lyin’ there!” the bartender says, but the man is already crossing the road. He rips open the door of his station wagon and dives into the backseat, hideously festooned with Cellular Circus coupons, empty beer cans, penguins, moldy sandwiches, newts, tinfoil, and ragged pieces of string. Finally he finds the jumper cables, tangled around the ribcage of a lawyer’s skeleton.

The man walks back into the bar, the jumper cables looped around his neck. The alligator is lurking underneath the pool table amidst a spray of white feathers.

“Do you serve lawyers here?” the man asks the bartender again. One of the metal claws on the jumper cables is crusty with battery acid. The man wonders what would happen if he licked it.

“I’m good,” the alligator mumbles.

“Shut up,” the man says. “I wasn’t talking to you.” He was only supposed to stop for one drink, then he could still be home early, like he promised his wife. Right about now she’ll be setting out the placemats, whisking some sauce with orange peel or capers, sweating and humming and rushing around in their little shit-brown kitchen where none of the cabinets close all the way. He’ll be late, maybe just a little, but then he’ll trip over the welcome mat, and she’ll start crying. A Niagara Falls of tears and him in the barrel. The man will take her in his tired arms and tell her what she wants to hear: that he’s finally got the drinking out of his system, that he’s ready to come home early, to put together the crib, to throw his dirty clothes in the hamper, to help her choose a baby name. And his wife will sigh and mash her face into his lime-green chest, anointing his shoulder with her slippery snot. He can bear her weeping but not her forgiveness.

The alligator belches.

The bartender looks the man up and down – his waxy shoes, his bandaged hands, his dirty polo, his neck hung low by dirty cables. Rumor has it that Cellular Circus finally fired him after he came back from “lunch break” and tried to lick a lesbian Eskimo.

“You can have one drink,” the bartender declares, setting a glass under the tap, “but don’t start anything.”

“Why would you say that?” the man asks. “I’m one of your best customers.”

The phone behind the bar rings.

“I’m not here,” the man says. “You haven’t seen me.”

A man walks into a bar carrying a goldfish, a parrot, a baby kangaroo, and a fifteen-inch pianist. The bar is loud and crowded, with a rabbi, a priest, and a nun reenacting the highlights from their softball victory, a party of polar bears blowing their bonuses on top-shelf single malt, and Shakespeare’s here tonight, punching hair-metal songs into the jukebox.

The man shouts, “Can I get a…” but then his feet slip out from under him and he smacks down on his tailbone in an unseen puddle of vomit. The goldfish, the parrot, the baby kangaroo, and the fifteen-inch pianist go flying.

“Can somebody give me a hand?” the man says, struggling to his knees, but no one moves. The man is bad luck, they agree, the type who will eventually insult a tribe of hungry cannibals, or leap from a plane wearing a book-bag instead of a parachute, and even if he survives there is the matter of the weeping wife, who still loves him despite the lies and debt and the moldering-liver smell.

“A beer,” the man says, finally heaving himself onto an empty stool. His soggy pants squelch against the cracked leather. “Keep ‘em coming.”

The bartender, a pony, coughs and pours.

“Busy tonight?” the man asks, squeezing his trembling hands together as in prayer.

The pony nods his extensive face but does not reply, only stares at the floor with wet eyes. The man knows he ought to inquire as to the pony’s sadness, but he really isn’t interested, besieged as he is by his own problems, and what’s more, there is a fresh beer sitting before him. The man drinks.

“Water,” the goldfish gasps from underneath a stool.

Each sip of beer is a reprieve, the jaggedness made smooth, the broken made whole again. The man wants to be a better man, and three sips into his beer he can see the possibility of change: first thing in the morning, a new résumé, then a new job. He’ll clean out his car, buy salad greens and yogurt, replace the Brita filter, fix the kitchen cabinet doors. He’ll even change the way he talks to his wife. It’s important, when the baby comes, that their voices be soft, tender, with rounded corners.

There is a knock at the door.

The bar patrons look up from their drinks, confused, because the door isn’t locked, is it?

“Honey?” calls a voice from outside. “Are you in there?”

The man hunches his shoulders and ducks his head, a humiliated gargoyle.

“Sweetheart?” she says again. “Baby, it’s me.”

The man grinds his teeth on the edge of his glass. Why is his wife here? He’s not even late yet, not very. And now the rabbi, the priest, and the nun have put down their mitts and are staring at him with those sanctimonious eyes. It’s only a beer. A man should be allowed to have one beer, to relax a little with his friends. His wife is so absolutist about everything. A more reasonable solution would be to cut back, to limit his drinking to one or two a night, except for special occasions. She can’t really expect him to stop entirely, can she? With all that he’s carrying?

Knock-knock.

His wife moves away from the bar door and begins pacing in front of the frosted window, shadow arms cradling a shadow basketball-belly. “Have a little faith in me,” the man always says, and she does, she still does. She has faith that her husband is going to come striding out of that bar any minute now. “Just settling my tab,” he’ll say. “These roses are for you.”

The pony coughs.

“You sick?” the parrot asks, extracting a cigarette from an abandoned pack.

The pony shakes his head. “No, I’m just….”

Hinge-squeals cut through the bartender’s answer as the door swings open. The man closes his eyes. He feels the blood rising in his neck, like hot rain in a clogged gutter. If only he could stab himself with a fork, cut off his head with a guillotine, anything rather than face this humiliation.

The bar is silent except for someone’s slow jingling steps.

The man opens his eyes. It is not his wife; it is a cowboy. The cowboy is so muscular, he cannot rest his arms at his sides; they perch like mug handles above the painful shine of his belt buckle.

“Howdy,” the cowboy says. But suddenly he is falling, his boots skidding left then right then up, like a newborn colt, and finally the seat of his hard-creased blue jeans lands in the vomit puddle.

“I just did that,” the man says, smiling for once. His misery may not love company, but it does enjoy her rare moments of attention.

The cowboy stands. He picks his hat off the floor. He removes a piece of partially digested carrot from the brim and places the hat back on his head. Then he grabs the man by his polo collar and tosses him against the side of the pool table.

“No, wait,” the man says, “you got the wrong idea…”

The cowboy does not wait. He cocks his alligator boot and releases it into the man’s stomach. The cowboy kicks him carefully, methodically, stepping back between blows to gauge the distance and effect. The man feels the rotten apple that is his body crumble and break. It does not hurt. Not yet. What bothers him is the bar patrons’ unwillingness to help. Where are the friends who say, “Break it up, break it up,” who wedge between the fighters like spatulas?

Knock-knock.

Kick. Kick.

“Have mercy,” the man croaks. “I’ve got a family.”

The cowboy spits, grabs the man by the ankles, and begins swinging his body in a circle like a hammer. This room has spun for the man many times before, but never so quickly. It is beautiful, almost, the kaleidoscope of gold taps, turquoise feathers, white fur, black habit, waxed wood, window shadows, and glass. The man’s loafers slip off. The air cools his wet socks.

The cowboy lets go and the man arcs through space, an Olympic record surely, if not for the light bulb above the pool table, which his head shatters, and then the less permeable jukebox. On impact, it whines, shudders, and begins playing Cinderella’s “Don’t Know What You Got (‘Till It’s Gone).”

“Honey?” his wife says from outside the door.

The man is bloody, shattered, and thirsty. He cries. He is a man who walks into bars. A nothing. A drunk.

“Hey,” the pony says, “why the long face?”

The bar patrons begin to laugh. The fifteen-inch pianist gasps and wheezes and clutches his gut. The cowboy stamps his foot so hard his spurs ring. Shakespeare pees in his pants a little. The goldfish, dead, does not laugh. But the rest of them, once they’ve started, cannot quit their rhythmic, vocalized, expiratory and involuntary actions.

“Stop it,” the man says.

They don’t stop. They laugh harder.

Twenty-five chuckling Polacks march in from the back room, all carrying a single stepladder. They approach the broken light bulb.

“Darling, come home,” his wife pleads and pounds.

The baby kangaroo snarfs his beer.

“It’s not funny!” the man cries. “It’s not funny at all.”

—Kate Reuther

Kate Reuther‘s fiction has appeared or is forthcoming in The Madison Review, Brain Child, Salamander, and The Ledge. She is a graduate of Yale and the Vermont College MFA in Fiction program. A life-long New Yorker, she lives in Washington Heights with her husband and two boys.

Shklovsky and Lish

Jan 312010

Now think about how Shklovsky and Lish fit together. Lish is a child of the stillborn American avant garde (postmodern) of the 60s and 70s. I mean people like Gass, Coover, Barthelme and Hawkes. Hawkes was famous for having said that plot, character, setting and theme are the enemies of the novel. Shklovsky’s Russian Formalism evolves out of Futurism and Don Quixote and Laurence Sterne’s Tristram Shandy. (Cervantes and Sterne invented most of the techniques of literary experiment; we just keep rediscovering them–note the blank pages in Lish’s novel Arcade and then go and look at the famous blank chapter in Tristram Shandy.) He says art is about technique (not about its subject matter). But the techniques he discusses are delay, stepped construction, deceleration, repetition, parallelism, differential perceptions and baring the device. His novels, even his essays for that matter, are strange, discursive, tangential, experimental narratives that include bits of memoir and literary criticism. Russian Formalism led through structuralist linguistics (Jacobson) and post-structuralism (Saussure and Barthes) to European literary theory–Barthes, Derrida and after. Lately Lish has been quoting European theorists like Kristeva, Deleuze and Lyotard in his epigraphs. Though they talk and write quite differently, both Lish and Shklovsky believe that subject matter is secondary to technique. They both use the formal disruption of mainstream expectation to jar the reader into paying attention to the reading of the text.