Robert Coover Books

The sheer brilliance of 'The Public Burning' cannot be understated. From the virtuousity of the writing to the subtle intelligence of its criticisms, this book still stands as a classic. Importantly, this novel is not merely an unfavourable take on the culture of the cold war but is a broader interrogation of the ways in which history folds into fantasy in American life, how law becomes theatre, war becomes spectacle, politics an electrocution. Its cartoonish aspects are not simply Coover's attempt to indict the era through mockery nor an invitation to stand over people in the past. Instead, they are a representation of a culture that can only ever come to terms with itself through cartoons, a nation that needs its enemies animated, its champions superheroic, its values decomplicated in dusty bromides and staid clichés. Most intriguing perhaps is the treatment of Eisenhower: in Coover's world, an example of how even the most moderate and benign public figures are entangled in the extremities of violence and cynicism that are not just the work of the political fringes nor the province of any one political party over another but are instead the popular centrifuge around which the idea of America assembles itself. There is no doubt that this is a highly political book but it is not political because it is partisan (a work of the Left raging against the Right) but rather because it is sceptical of politics altogether. All Americans assemble to see the Rosenbergs fry -- wherever they may lie on the political spectrum, Democrat or Republican, conservative or dissident. What burns in this novel is the public -- the very idea of a public entity or a civic realm which is constituted through well-intentioned notions of truth, security, justice, freedom and faith, but which cannot have any of these without an allegiance to the idea of the nation itself, an allegiance which will allow dissent within tight bounds but which will put those too far outside this boundary - especially those who move against the state in a criminal way - to a showy, spectacular death. At the heart of all this lies Nixon, not just because the disgraced future President is an indication of democratic bankruptcy, a representative of how power has become so misplaced, but also because he embodies the emptiness of the idea of the nation itself, the coercive need to 'act American' which is necessary to put into motion this patriotic stir of activity, this great rollicking farce. I note that some reviewers here have taken issue with the apparent lack of depth in the characters Coover offers in this book - Uncle Sam as snake-oil salesman, Nixon as buffoon and so on -- but this misses the author's real aim: to assemble already well-worn clichés in such an intense concentration that they expose the impossibility of character in such a culture, to demonstrate how the idea of America strings itself together in a series of lip-service wisdoms about history and destiny that ultimately eclipse individuality and to place each and every person in proximity to the electric chair, implicating everyone in the violent lunacy of the legal execution, which, because it is carried out in the name of the people, cannot help but involve the people in their entirety. Too often authors attempt to criticise America by putting forward a vision of what the 'real' America actually is or what the 'true' America should be, an alternative in either way that 'sheds light' on how the 'actual' inherent worth of the country has been corrupted. Coover, on the other hand, will have none of this: the carnivalesque inferno he conjures out of the careful blend of fiction and fact is aimed at decimating any salvageable idea of the nation at all, of tearing the whole logic of allegiance to the ground. In this sense, and quite proudly and profoundly, 'The Public Burning' is as treasonous to America as the Rosenbergs were deemed to be themselves.

It has to be said, however, that this book is not so much a defence of the Rosenbergs themselves or their crimes as it is a critique of the law that convicted them. It is a misreading of this book to assume the Rosenbergs are made into heroes, or that their operatic casting as victims should make us excuse their proven or potential guilt. Rather, Coover looks to them not to pardon them but to tell a story that will act as a counternarrative to how guilt and innocence were decided in this case. To this day, the controversy surrounding the Rosenberg trial is not so much to do with whether they were foreign agents (it seems Julius Rosenberg was involved in espionage, though the evidence is still out on his wife, Ethel) or whether the information they provided to the Russians was of any actual use (there is still some debate over this) but rather the gross miscarriage of justice embodied in the way they were put to death. As Justice Douglas explains early in the book to Uncle Sam, the US Constitution states that "no person shall be convicted of treason unless on the testimony of two witnesses to the same overt act, or on confession in open court." In the Rosenberg case, there was only one witness - Julius' brother-in-law, David Greenglass - and no confession. As such, to get around this, government prosecutors tried the Rosenbergs on a lesser conspiracy law, a piece of legislation which had been enacted by Congress to circumvent the 'two witness' provision by revising it so that only one witness's testimony could permit a conviction. And yet the hypocrisy of this was not so much the law in and of itself but the fact that the Rosenbergs were convicted on this lesser law even as they were sentenced to death on a *higher* law. Their prosecution went against the provisions of the Constitution but they were also handed the maximum punishment for treason - death - that only the Constitution allows. In other words, what enabled them to be executed was the very document that was shunned by prosecutors in the first place. This kind of legal cherrypicking is at the heart of Coover's critique because it demonstrates how the Constitution - designed, remember, not only to protect the nation from traitors but also to prevent the misuse of power, a different kind of treason - was corrupted in this case to serve the so-called national interest. If Coover wants this book to be traitorous in its searing critique of the idea of America, he also wants it to be constitutional. In fact, what Coover ironically shows us is that to be treasonous and to be a constitutionalist is one and the same in the USA so many years on from its founding. To think ourselves outside the nation is to actually think toward the document that brought it into being. This is not to say that Coover believes he can discern some 'true' shape of the nation in the constitution. No, in adhering to the constitution so closely, he cleverly highlights how the self-autonomising nature of that document - as the 'thing-in-itself' of the nation, as that which declared it into existence and thus somehow simultaneously embodied a pure *arrival* at its essence, already, case closed, all those hundreds of years ago - is so routinely and naturally undercut by the manipulations inherent to the history of the nation's actual practice. In truth, there is no democratic ideal so guaranteed by that founding document that we can't find a way to detain it or delay it or circumvent it on the ground - and always in the name of that selfsame democratic ideal, of course, and in the name of the constitution that is meant to forever defend it. In this sense, 'The Public Burning' is neither a simple-minded polemic against the cynicism of a culture nor a ham-fisted attempt to excuse the inexcusable. In the end, and with great courage and sensitivity, it is one long oath to a nation we would like to think exists but never really does.

Perhaps it's unfair of me to rate this book, since I didn't make it to the end. It was disappointing, since I've liked others of Coover's books. This one is written in a stream of consciousness style reminiscent of James Joyce/"Ulysses" (which I liked a lot). Similarly, it also is incredibly literate and erudite, lots of language play which still somehow was mostly just hard and not fun the way language should and can be. I could appreciate the humor intellectually, but it wasn't really funny. The subject matter is a cynical take on a dark subject, the Rosenberg executions. I can certainly understand why its release was so contoversial. It might help to know more about the period but as someone who came of political age (later) during the Watergate years I know little about Nixon as VP and many of the social references were lost on me.

Every now and then I finish a book and ask, "Now why did this author write that?" I'm not talking about trash reading. We know what that's for; entertainment. No, when I ask "Why?" after finishing a book, it's generally a longer work with artistic ambitions and evidently an important point to make. I just can't tell what that point might be.

Take "The Public Burning". The author, Robert Coover, is widely considered to be one of the leading lights of American experimental fiction. The novel is a semi-fictionalized narrative of the days preceding the execution of Ethel and Julius Rosenberg, here as in real life convicted of treason for selling atomic secrets to the Russians. It's a good read, but what's the value in telling a true story in such an odd way? The true story is dramatic enough as is. Coover never quite answers that, and it weakens his book.

Feel free to skip this part if you know the historical facts:

Back in the 1950s, the Soviet Union exploded a nuclear bomb. Many assumed that the Soviets must have stolen nuclear information from the U.S. through a network of spies, and the FBI picked the Rosenbergs as the guilty parties. They were convicted and sentenced to death, and despite a last-minute stay of execution by Supreme Court Justice William O. Douglas, they went to the electric chair on June 19, 1953.

In his novel, Coover recasts the Rosenberg execution as a piece of political theater, deliberately staged by the Eisenhower administration to boost American morale, and therefore set to take place as the novel opens not at the Sing Sing death house, but in the middle of Times Square. Uncle Sam, here a real person, is a sort of superhero, possessed of remarkable powers in his neverending battle against the Phantom, his appropriately shady Communist counterpart. And perhaps most bizarrely, while half the chapters have the usual third-person narrator telling the story in a kind of hyper-inflated circus language, the other chapters are narrated by none other than Vice President Richard Nixon.

Before we get to Tricky Dick, however, let's consider the carnival-barker narration of the other chapters. It's filled with comic-book jargon, interjections on the order of "Good Heavens!" and various other cheesy rhetorical devices. Uncle Sam himself speaks like a snake-oil salesman, tossing in many a "Whoopee-ti-yi-yo!" and things like that as the execution approaches.

Evidently, this book seeks to present the United States as a nation of con men and suckers, but in the midst of all the tinsel and ballyhoo (directed by Cecil B. DeMille, with sets by Walt Disney), it seems like a lot of fun. Coover shows a nice balance between the exhilaration of rah-rah Americanism and the horror of the rot under the surface. It's all part of the same long, strange trip, and you can't have one without the other.

With a similar schizophrenia, in his sections of this book, Nixon has a sort of poetry in his soul and genuine sense of mission, both of them about as banal as you please. That sounds like a contradiction in terms, I know, but what else can you say about a character who comes right out and says that he loves his wife primarily because she belongs to him? Who can't decide between serving his country and serving himself, and often conflates the two? And who spends half his time parsing every one of Uncle Sam's most moronic clichés like it was the entrails of some sacrificial chicken?

If this description reminds you of your favorite national politican, Republican or Democrat, I assure you that's not a coincidence. Nixon himself once said, in real life, that John Kennedy was what people wanted to be, and he himself what they actually were. In any case, his fictionalized counterpart here is doubtless what we're afraid we are. He is Vice President of the United States, for God's sake, and he's still a loser. He sweats and stinks through the pages in desperate need of a shave or a toilet, he strains to justify himself and his past in the middle of a national crisis, he can't even relax while playing golf. And needless to say, the more he struggles for victory, the more clownish he becomes. By the time the book is over, a jammed Times Square has had an eyeful of Dick Nixon with his pants around his ankles, and there are worse humiliations in store for him.

Okay, so far we've got an examination of the American split personality from two very different and complementary points of view, filtered through an actual historical event and featuring historical figures. I was intrigued. So why did I feel so let down when I reached the last page?

I think it's because, when you get right down to cases, nothing really happens in "The Public Burning". Ethel and Julius Rosenberg die, Uncle Sam taps Nixon as a future president, and things go back to the way they were before. For all the flash and dazzle, the comic book zip, the world of this book and the world we live in are pretty much alike. Which isn't a bad thing, but the flourish made me anticipate something more, some explosive scream at the end. Instead, "The Public Burning" reads like Coover simply observed these events through a literary kaleidoscope and wrote down what he saw. That makes for good painting sometimes, but not necessarily good novels; "The Public Burning" is an amusing experiment, but so what?

In short, this book would have made a truly fascinating short piece, and even as is it's a lot of fun to read for the language alone. Really good full-length novels, on the other hand, leave what Anthony Burgess called some kind of residue in the mind. "The Public Burning" just slides right through. Bring on the next one.

Benshlomo says, 500-odd pages ought to weigh more than this.

It's good to have red-baiting reviewers like Kevin Bowman to prove Robert Coover's point a half-century after the Rosenbergs died and nearly thirty years after his book appeared. Gee, even an evil intellectual ("vindictive college professor") turns up in Kevin's review. Talk about fully-formed characters.

It's a great book. You don't have to agree with the politics. There are parts where Coover goes way over the top, as you might expect with any 800 pound gorilla of a novel like this. It's true, it is a little "sophomoric" sometimes. It's profound more often, though, and not just because Coover takes potshots at Luce's Time Magazine.

Seriously, this is an unjustly ignored masterpiece. Let's hope there are more vindictive college professors out there.

Any book based on the premise that the Rosenbergs were innocent, deserving of beatification, victims of awful America, is not going to date well. 1977, I suppose, was a kind of high-water mark for that sort of thinking. If you have a friend who thinks Stalin was unfairly maligned, this may be the book for him.

I was forced to read this book cover to cover by a vindictive college professor who assigned it to me (and me alone) as the subject for a class writing project. I loathed every minute of it. From its doctrinaire anti-anti-communist, anti-Americanism; its sub-Dos Passos modernism; its sophomoric delight in scatology (giggle, giggle, tee hee, Nixon has sex with Ethel Rosenberg and is then anally raped by Uncle Sam). There are no fully-formed characters, just endless making of puerile political points. Nixon-bad. Time Magazine-bad. America-bad. Ethel Rosenberg-saint and martyr.

Its like a bad book treatment of a very bad Ken Russell movie. I'd rather eat jagged metal bits than be forced to read this pompous, train-wreck of a book ever again.

I enjoyed this book immensely. Fans of metafiction--that is, fiction about the way fiction works--will find much to enjoy here. Readers looking for a linear storyline and 'realistic' plot should probably stay away. As mentioned before, 'GHOST TOWN' is perhaps best described as a send-up of the Cormac McCarthry western in the style, perhaps, of Thomas Pynchon, Donald Barthemle or Italo Calvino. It is rather imperative that one understands and appreciates the metafiction aesthetic, at least in general, if s/he plans to get anything approaching enjoyment out of this novel. Otherwise, there is a significant chance that you will come away rather frustrated. If this sounds like something you think you might enjoy then I'd be willing to bet that you will.

This is the first Robert Coover book I have read, and I must say, I thoroughly enjoyed it! Some of the dialog was so funny, I had to laugh out loud. The style in which this was written is so refreshing; unlike anything I have read. It's like 'The Twilight Zone' meets 'Gunsmoke' or something. This book may not appeal to all readers, but for me, it was perfectly entertaining. I look forward to reading more of Robert Coover's books.

Ghost Town, Robert Coover (7/02): This is an amazing novel in that it is simultaneously juvenile and pretentious. This attempt at a Beckian version of Cormak McCarthy succeeds on no level. The long drawn out prose are neither poetic nor sparse. The re-visioning of the cowboy myth, by portraying a violent grotesque environment, only come off as silly and has been done before. I could not tell whether the frequent, homey existential quips by the cowboys were supposed to make fun the of the genre or were meant to be profound. Yet, they succeeded at neither. In short, this is another over-praised novel by an author of noteworthy intentions but little original skill needed to pull it off.

Less disconnected than some Coover books I've read, Ghost Town borrows elements from literary and hollywood westerns and gives them a subversive and often graphic edge. At times a wonderful read with passages that flow beautifully and at other times harsh and violent. It contains the single bloodiest knife fight in fiction history. All in all a risky venture but Coover blends these two opposites and keeps it together through the end.

Those who come to Coover from his earlier works are well-prepared for this remarkable synthesis of excellent language, excellent description, excellent mood. Those new to Coover will delight in their discovery. Ghost Town is somehow less earnest, more effortless, than earlier Coover, and is more mature for it. Here is a novel that makes no apologies, denies an association with the "modern novel," and expertly ignores the western as genre by setting itself right in the middle of it. In Coover's Ghost Town, genre cliches become literary devices, and stereotypes become grammatical foils. Critics (not to mention grad students) will be playing with this one for years; casual readers will carry it around with them and read their favorite bits over and over again for even longer.

"So Pinocchio gets his wish and becomes a real boy. And he lives happily ever after." If only life were like a fairy tale. We would all be loved and protected by our mothers and fathers forever and none of us would ever grow old or suffer the infirmities of aging. Unfortunately, like everyone else, Pinocchio does grow old and may even be dying. Despite having had a successful life in academia in America and having achieved world-wide renown as an art scholar, an author, and as a two time Nobel Prize winner, in his dotage Pinocchio looks back upon a life filled with unhappiness and regret. Unlike the often inaccurate Disney biography, Gepetto, his creator and father, was not a kindly old man, nor did his mother, the blue-haired fairy, keep all the promises she made to him during his boyhood. To add to Pinocchio's agony, various bodily parts and his skin are falling off, his feet had been burnt off in a fire, and his nose is not what it is purported to be. Worst of all, he is once again turning into a piece of wood.

In the book Pinocchio is shown returning to his birth place, Venice, and is reunited with his old friends (including two talking dogs) and foes alike. He attends a wild and raucous masked carnival in which he is the guest of honor.

Robert Coover is a marvelously imaginative story teller. His use of language and imagery transforms Pinocchio's surroundings into a panorama of grotesque characters and nightmarish situations. Pinocchio is presented not as a puppet, but as a true to life human being of great dignity. He suffers the universal fears of growing old: leaving unfinished business, failures in love, the attending loss of physical and mental powers, and the inevitability of death. All this is realistically and sensitively rendered by Mr. Coover.

Coover has no truck with the security, the romantic haze even, the complacent ease with which the story of Venice is enshrouded, and seeks to shatter the rosy-red miasma that surrounds all things Venetian. Thus destabilised, the reader becomes prey (open to?) a new, more unsettling, and ultimately keener edged storytelling (the safety of the familiar overthrown). Pinocchio is cindered: forget his feet, he is totalised. There is a huge energy in reframing the familiar, and seeing it so vividly anew. Readers ought to be pachyderms to deal with the "every canal an open sewer" of Coover's scatalogical depositary of a book. But suspend your sense of disbelief (probably meaning nausea) and revel in the language - it has more arabesques and whirls, more swoops and pirouettes than anything contemporary you are likely to read (at the rear end of a Vaporetto, lazily sweeping along Tronchetto, or past Zattere...) Those evil frog-types - Venice will never be the same again.

I bought this book in Tokyo at Kinokuniya bookstore in 1991. I had never read anything by Coover before. The first thing I noticed was that the guy could write; write as well as Beckett; that he was a follower of Beckett, actually. From the first to the last word I was awed by his command of the english sentence. I remembered Carlo Collodi's Pinocchio well, so I was also delighted by the internal jokes, by the playful, carnival-like atmosphere of the book.

Masterworks like Spanking the Maid, Charlie in the House of Rue and Ghost Town have only confirmed the fact that Coover is on a different level from other american novelists.

Let's face it, american fiction has plummeted from the zenith it reached in the days of Hemingway and Faulkner. Those two writers could be put side by side with Kafka and Borges as short story writers; or Joyce, Celine and Beckett as novelists. Hemingway and Faulkner even created writing styles that lesser writers copied, pasted and edited. After the war we have Nabokov, almost at the same level as the great pair; then we have Bellow, Mailer and Salinger, a little below in the pecking order; and then Roth and Barth, ditto; and later on: Pynchon, Anne Tyler, Carver, etc. An almost perfect example of the law of diminishing returns. I say almost because there are some exceptions: Flannery O'Connor and Robert Coover being two of the most notable.

That much said, this is one of Coover's best books, a little childish in places, but a delight from beginning to end. And after all, Hemingway and Faulkner were only two great writers, so if we could only get someone to pair with Coover as the other towering figure in contemporary American Lit(Annie Dillard or Grace Pailey, maybe) we'll be, not even, but close enough to that peak.

"Pinocchio" certainly is postmodern literature at its best. This book reverses Collodi's fairy-tale ( so don't be surprised when the puppet becomes a piece of wood again at the end of the story ), fills the blanks left open in the original tale with some hilariously funny and sometimes absurdly unreal stories, and, moreover, mixes everything with excerpts from quite a few literary classics, "Don Quixote" and "Death in Venice" among them. Big-time comedy and good entertainment guaranteed!

Before tackling this book by that real boy, that master of juvenile linguistic pyrotechnics(some of Coover's convoluted sentences are as witty as anything written by anyone in English this century) the reader, and there won't be too many casual or should I say causal readers, should study the original Pinnochio. Those whose familiarity with Pinnochio comes only from the Disney movie won't get the in-jokes. What's with the obsession with Pinnochio among post-modern authors of coldly intellectual books that appeal only to other writers who teach writing? I'm thinking of Jerome Charyn's send up of Pinnochio, "Pinnochio's Nose," another picaresque novel that was a virtuoso performance, but instantly forgettable.

Coover's lengthy tome presents the intertwined tales of the lives of bizarre folks in a small town. The pseudo-stream-of-consciousness styling necessitates constant repetition of basic facts about the characters, so that the reader doesn't forget who's who. Despite my average rating, I stuck with it to the end, who knows, maybe you will too.

Is that a contradiction? Perhaps. The mountains of expository prose without dialougue breaks or chapter divisions make this a forbidding work, and yet Coover's prose is so incandescent, so witty with its turns of phrase, puns, and moments of sublime insight that I couldn't put it down. The first half of the book is a satire on small town life, the second half is both surreal and sad, but engaging throughout. I especially liked the contrast between John and John's Wife, between the man of action (destructive action) and his evanescent spouse, as if Coover were contrasting the world and the spirit in this unlikely paring. A excellent book, and I plan to read more by this author

I had never heard of Coover before seeing the book in the discount section of a bookstore. The first paragraph of the book was on the cover, and it was so well written, so interesting, that I purchased it on the spot.

While I am glad to have met this obviously skilled writer, the book was tough to get through because it maintained one clever, ironic tone and never waivered (although it was well written). It was almost hypnotic in its metronomic leaping from character to character, and the omnipotent viewpoint of the narrator was claustrophobic and omnipresent. I wanted to grab the narrator and demand that he (yes, he) release his monopolistic grip on defining the reality of this town, and let the people in it define themselves.

I kept waiting for the characters to have even the slightest glimmer of self-awareness, and just when they appeared to reach this point, the author had them chicken out or choose the easy path and sink back into the self-deluded oblivion of their small town lives and loves.

And, in the end, that is what this book is all about--how we bury ourselves in self-delusions of grandeur, greed, sex, food, money, lust, work, religion, and art in order to obscure our own cowardice from ourselves. Coover leaves us with an incredibly bleak (if comedic) view of suburban life, but let's face it, like all dark comedies, it is the truth that makes it have relevance.

The title character, John's Wife, is the ultimate focal point of all of the character's neurotic longings. Not surprisingly, she is a total figment of their corporate imagination, so much so that she has no independent existence at all, not even a name.

As the characters become engulfed by their neurotic behavior and longings, they lose their focus on John's Wife and she starts to disappear and reappear in startling ways. At the climax of the novel, with the very fabric of reality tearing apart (all sorts of fantastic things occur with bewildering normalcy), John's Wife has disappeared altogether, except for a few mercy visits to try to heal the wounds like the Virgin Mary miraculously appearing. Life only becomes stabilized (if remaining incredibly vacuous) in the morning light when this central fantasy (John's Wife) reappears and is restored to centrality.

One can read each of the neurotic characters as one aspect of one personality--say, the author, who invites this transference through his "Artist as Editor" character. In a sense, we have internalized all sorts of neurotic habits in order to mask the larger unpleasant truth--that we are solely responsible for our own happiness and self-development, and that facing into our Selves is beyond our capacity. And we then focus our efforts on one unreal, externalized, unattainable goal--John's Wife--so as to fool ourselves into thinking that we are making progress.

Have I read too much into what other reviewers have seen merely as a dark comment on suburbanism? Possibly, but the author invites this speculation, which raises this book above the level of just a good read to, dare I say it, art.

Briar Rose is the name of the princess in Sleeping Beauty and the name of the Grimm brothers version of the story is Little Briar Rose. Robert Coover tells the story from three points of view. First is the point of view of the prince entering and cutting his way through the briars on a heroic/erotic quest. Then there is the princess dreaming of her rescue by a kiss from the spell induced by a spindle prick and the promised handsome prince who will do the kissing. Lastly, is the evil fairy who cast the spell and who keeps the princess company by telling her stories during her 100 year slumber. The story keeps switching between these three perspectives, with much repetition. Each character explores their own expectations and fears through this process.

This is a story rich in mythic and erotic symbolism, and Coover explores these in depth as each character relives the event in their mind from slightly different perspectives over and over again. As a study in the symbolism and possible overtones of the brief story, Coover's work is excellent. People looking for a romantic retelling of the original tale should definitely look elsewhere because some of the variations include disturbing elements like incest, cannibalism, adultery, and rape. While nowhere near as much an erotic fantasy as Anne Rice's three volume Beauty series, this book is still not appropriate for the faint of heart or children.

I kept falling asleep when I was reading this--and all I can remember now, its been a year. Is how weird I found it. It kept giving me weird ideas, that perhaps the author would have loved to seen Sleeping Beauty as a porno flick instead of a fairy tale.

Strange, strange book. Though it certainly has some unique ideas in it.

This is a really dark book, even if it is amazingly short.

Well, sorry but this story [is disappointing]. Espescially for anyone who enjoyed the story and idea of Sleeping Beauty. And its not even that the story is that bad. The writing [is no good]. The reader is constantly confused, and even when you've finished the book, you might go "huh?" I hated it. I do not suggest that anyone buy this book.

While reading Coover's book, you might find yourself confused. This is only appropriate, as Coover wrote an existential masterpiece. The prince's efforts to penetrate the briar hedge lead him nowhere. Beauty dreams of a series of princes waking her, each worse than the last. They seek eachother because they seek the only concept they know will not melt away.

If you consider the phrase "someday my prince will come" sacrosanct, this is probably not a good one to read.

If you need a traditional narrative, this is probalby not a good one to read.

If you're looking for a read aloud for your children...perhaps try a different book.

Otherwise, enjoy.

As I read this book for a college class on fairy tales, I began to realize what Coover was doing: throwing out narrative for an exploration of destiny, fairy tales, dreams, story, and relationship to the reader. By the end of the short book, I totally hated it. So what do I do? I read it again. That's right, I'm drawn back to this meticulous piece of boredom. I guess that means the book is either brilliant or such a beautiful car wreck I have to make a U-turn to take a second look.

You must remember this features the love of Rick and Ilse as you've never imagined it before. Other stories offer a colorful
though often sadistic portrayal of the place where reality
meets the celluloid imaginings that too often seem to dominate
our lives. Wonderful, clear, easy to read prose. Bitingly honest.

A Night at the Movies, is an illussive postmodern novel waith a dangerous twist of cinema genres. Coover's text interest me because all of the stories in novel seem to deal with identity. This is why I found the book confusing. Coover's illusive words and characters makr the novel hard to follow. Although coover's novel wasconfusing , it was not all bad. One of Coover's overall strengths was that he is able to create the cinematic feeling by being very desciptive. An example of his discriptive skill shows up in "Chalie in the House of Rue". Charlie discovers a police officer sitting in a tub of water. Coover describes,"His uniform is black ripply beneath the surface, the brass botton appearing to float free"(107). This descriptiion helps you visualize the officer, asif you are in the movies watching. This book is a okay read, but is very confusing. I suggest if you are not a vivid reader not to read this book. Unless your teacher assigns it. which in this case you better read it.

A Night at the Movies by Robert Coover takes a look at film of the twentieth century in a way that makes you feel like you're in the front row enjoying every scene. Coover's breakdown of the different film genres is great. He gives us all a little taste of everything in the first chapter and then gets more focused on particular genres in later chapters. One of the overall strengths in the book is the transition from one genre to the next. In the beginning of the book where Coover is moving rapidly through different genres he still manages to tie in an interesting story. An over all weakness of the text is the very short sections between the others. These stories are very short and kind of slow. After reading them I wondered why they are even in the book. Coovers text provides a smooth transition from one film genre to the next. He does a good job of accomplishing what he set out to do. Which is explore the different types of films of our time. Coover's A Night at the Movies is worth while reading for anyone who is interested in film and wants to examine a wide range of film genres.

A NIGHT AT THE MOVIES by Robert Coover is a bunch of short stories within a story, these stories are based on movie sterotypes. This story is based on sex and violence which increase within the story. This story shows the purpose of the increase in sex and violence within society from the 40's to the present. Coover strength in most cases is how he uses various movie sterotypes to display the ending that is not your typical ending. A western movie would overall include the "good guy" winning, however its not in this case. Overall A NIGHT AT THE MOVIES by Robert Coover is a good read that display the way in which modern society has changed its openness and view on sex and violence and how people typically think a certain movie will end. This book is designed for a more mature audiance.

"A Night at the Movies" by Robert Coover is a book partitioned into chapters each representing different film genre with sex and violence being the most dominant. One of the overall strength in Coover's text is that it is as close to reality as it is to fiction. That is considering the ideas and not necessarily the stories. For example, he explicitly describes sexual encounters which represents the unconscious thought of human beings. Coover makes a lot of references to multiple specific movie titles which a number of readers may not have seen or even heard of; however, his main intention is the general genres. The structure of the plot of this text is hetrogeneous with no clear cut shifting points. He takes the reader flying, sailing, riding, walking.. in a short moment. This can leave the reader confused and feeling a sense of ambiguity. However, Coover does a good job in recapturing the reader's attention. Especially when he reminds the reader between now and then that he/she doesn't belong in the story. He/she is only watching or reading the events. The reader is an outsider looking in. Coover plays with the elements of fiction very well to make this book a great piece of postmodernism.

I did not find this book particularly erotic, and it was plotless to me.

Taking a cue from Raymond Queneau's "Exercises in Style," and his own short stories featured in "Pricksongs and Descants," what would seem to be only an experiment develops into a real commentary on self-reference and post structuralism. Coover's treatment of the master-slave, dominant-submissive relationship serves to show the sado-masochistic exchange that exists in language when that language becomes "meta" language, or language about language. In this way all "criticism" is "criticized," begging the question: if meta language is sado-masochistic, what is meta-meta language?

The novel also works despite its subject matter-- if Coover had chosen some other setting, one could still delight in the way he weaves repitition into an ongoing cascade, each permutation the same and wholly different. Chaos theory as literary genre? Now who's being sado-masochistic?

Coover's brief tale takes a paper-thin premise and runs it right into the ground--yes, it's yet another one of those self-indulgent, self-conscious post-modernist novels seldom enjoyed by anyone who isn't an undergraduate English major. It's a very short book that you will likely wish were shorter. But though the plot goes (by design) nowhere, and the book is stuffed with the kind of affected whimsy employed by writers far too impressed with their own intelligence, there is some witty, bouncy prose to enjoy and a few inspired comic moments. For what it is, it's well put together.

I did not care for the endless repetition with minor variations. I did not care for the one-sidedness of it all--man gets off, maid is out in the cold. I did not care for the endless repetition with minor variations. One had the feeling someone was trying out a lit'rary exercise and it got published by mistake. One had no sympathy for any one in the book, and one felt one was overcharged.

This elegant, concisely written masturbatory farce, in which similar scenes of a maid's transgression and a master's punishment are played out over and over again, conflates the delicious repetitive nature of erotic fantasy with a send-up of "Last Year at Marienbad"-type fiction--to an effect that is both erotically arousing and hilarious. Coover's greatest tour-de-force and a tiny, but original, masterpiece.

I received this book from an old friend who I hadn't seen in nearly twenty years--she showed up unannounced, spent a few hours sitting in the sun, and then disappeared just as unexpectedly. I still don't know if she meant to leave the book behind, but I've decided that I won't give it up. Cornell's boxes have a strange beauty that seems to attract strange birds--deceptively simple, at first you barely realize how quickly you can slip into these lost, overlooked, forgotten worlds that seem to hum along according to an amusingly skewed logic. Many of the stories and poems show writers who've successfully crossed over and have sent back postcards filled with the fresh and unfamiliar voices of travellers far from home.

... I was so psyched when I first saw the book, but then I noticed that many of the contributors to it--famous though they may be--pretty much just handed in whatever they had in the bottom of their drawers for this collection. I don't know that for a fact, but it seems that way. The poems and stories in here are vapid, lacking any of the kind of creative formal risks that Cornell and his boxes are known. Add to this the fact that the editor included one of his own stories in the anthology (alongside the famous chaps) .... WAy over priced too, I'd say. I can't recommend it. The book offended me in fact.

With it's tipped in plates and beautiful end papers I think this book is a bibliophile's dream. Being a big fan of Cornell's work I was very impressed and pleased with the overall packaging, which I find to be quite lovely, and the quality of the writing. Finally I was really impressed when I found out that the editor put it all together while he was still in college. I think this is a great book for fans of Joseph Cornell's boxes.

I'm a huge Joseph Cornell fan, and own every book that has anything to do with him. This is the best! Not only are the images beautiful and plentiful (and many new to me), but the stories and poems are so unbelievably entertaining and different from one another. I've never seen a book quite like this one, and I'm going to give a copy to everyone I know!

I too am a big fan of Joseph Cornell, and this sort of new book, A Convergence of Birds, is one that I was eager to read. The first short story, Emory Bear Hands' Birds, by Barry Lopez is powerful and worthy of being placed in this anthology. But the rest of the collection, pa-tooey. Even the Joyce Carol Oates contribution is suspiciously unworthy of publication. The rest of the pieces, both the poetry and short stories, are simply stream of consciousness junk writing that should never have found publication anywhere, least of all, in this beautiful-looking tribute to Cornell. Perhaps there are writer snobs "out there" who claim to understand this stuff, but once again I'm afraid the emperor is wandering around looking for his underwear.

Taking only the scintillating, perverted elements and adding a dark, unbounded hatred for all that is "church" this author's treatment of every story hinted at in this text is without feeling or imagination. Salman Rushdie's review that this work occupies a place of honor is an accurate gauge of his lack of taste. I found it for 1.50 in a Univ. bin and regretted the waste of a decent binding as I threw it in the trash.

This is a fairy tale for adults, with all the elements of those tales you knew as children, but more. The book is an easy read, entertaining, and only long enough for a short afternoon or evening. The content, illustrations, and binding guarantee that it will be parked on your library shelf. It's a great introduction to Coover, and aptly demonstrates why he will, in my opinion, gain a rightful place among our country's great authors.