A Glimpse of Robert Coover

by Colin McGowan

The 92-year-old novelist Robert Coover likes a breathless, pages-long paragraph, fat with lists and layered metaphor, repetition, contradiction, bluster and refrain, puns, dialect, intricate and seemingly irrelevant detail, lanced with digressions—beginning with an em dash and progressing through thickets of clauses complicated by parentheticals, winnowing and broadening and branching like country roads or vascular systems or, come to think of it, speech and thought—the sense of which can escape you by the time you reach the end of a paragraph, leaving you to decide whether to work back through the grammatical algebra or just give yourself over to the velocity of it.

This summer I read John’s Wife, a brutally horny Clinton-era survey of a nameless small town whose citizens whirl in the gravity of the titular John, a real estate developer who handpicks the mayor; operates an airport, a civic center, and several malls; is sucked off in the pilot seat of a plane by a Parisian artist who kills herself, in part, because she can’t have him to herself. The histories and longings of the town’s citizens are delineated in abundant detail, the chapterless and constant narration shifting between the perspectives of thirty-odd characters, but every situation is somehow informed or limited by John’s power. As for John’s Wife, who is never named, everybody wants to be or sleep with or kill her.

It’s not what I’d call pleasure reading, but Coover’s prose has almost pharmaceutical effects on my mind. “The Creep’s mother, also Jennifer’s and little Zoe’s, once known as Trixie the go-go dancer and now as Beatrice, the preacher’s wife, had arrived at that party straight from church choir practice, feeling exhilarated.” Descriptions like this one are both helpful and exhausting. They’re also Coover’s way of tracing the fissures in the maybe-not-so-unified whole of an individual, in a maybe-not-so-unified town.