Robert Coover

Writer

• Born: February 4, 1932
• Place of Birth: Charles City, Iowa
• Died: October 5, 2024

AMERICAN NOVELIST AND SHORT-STORY WRITER

Biography

Robert Lowell Coover writes in various literary forms, including short fiction, drama, film script, novella, and review-essay, of which he wrote a handful on such writers as Samuel Beckett and Gabriel García Márquez, for whom he has a particular affinity. It is through the novel, however, that he achieved his greatest renown. A central figure in twentieth-century American literature, he demonstrated no interest whatsoever in celebrity and mass appeal that is often equated with literary success in the West. On the other hand, it is from the same mass culture that Coover drew the subjects of his fiction, among them baseball, Cold War paranoia, apocalyptic religion, Charles Chaplin, Richard Nixon, and Dr. Seuss’s The Cat in the Hat (1957).

Coover was born in the small mining town of Charles City, Iowa, where his father managed the local newspaper. After college, a tour of duty in the Navy, and marriage, Coover began teaching (at Bard College and other colleges) while devoting as much time as possible to his writing. Unlike the majority of so-called academic writers, Coover spent most of his career away from the universities until the early 1980s, when he joined the faculty of Brown University. Encouraged to expand and elaborate on the mining materials in his early story "Blackdamp" (1961), Coover produced the work that established his importance as a young as well as daring—and, to some reviewers, iconoclastic—writer, The Origin of the Brunists (1966), which won the 1966 William Faulkner Award for best first novel.

The thematic and technical preoccupations of Coover’s entire career can be found in this novel. Coover was a moralist who was determined to show the error of human ways. He positions human beings not at the center of the world but rather at the center of the fiction they construct to explain that world and make it amenable to human habitation and their inflated sense of self-importance. Longing for stasis and immortality, Coover’s characters persist in believing in such used-up forms and ideas as realism, reason, progress, and religion, all the metaphors they have come to accept as reality. Such acceptance prevents them from taking responsibility for their existence as the begetters of the fictive beliefs by which they live. Coover’s narrative method is the antithesis of his characters’ static obsessiveness. Rather than allowing himself to be imprisoned by fiction, Coover exploits fiction’s metaphoric possibilities, making it increasingly difficult for the readers to do with their fiction what Coover’s characters do with theirs: confuse them with reality.

This dual tendency—to exploit the metaphoric possibilities and widen the gap between meaningless reality and exhaustively meaningful fiction—became increasingly noticeable during Coover’s career. Coover moves from a quasi-realism in The Origin of the Brunists (1966) and a thin separation between myth and reality in The Universal Baseball Association, Inc. J. Henry Waugh, Prop. (1968) to a doubling of narrative voices and overrich historical texture in The Public Burning (1977) and a full exploitation of narrative’s permutational possibilities in Spanking the Maid (1982) and Gerald’s Party (1986). By exploiting his characters’ confusion over how fiction and fictive beliefs overwhelm and supplant protean, meaningless reality, Coover undermines fiction’s authority and the suspension of disbelief it demands. In this way, he liberates the reader not from fiction or from fiction-making, which he sees as a basic human need, but rather from the stranglehold of any one fiction or fictive system. In effect, Coover gives greater importance to the making of fiction, the imaginative process itself, than to the fiction it produces: process over product, the maker over the consumer.

Not surprisingly, Coover has been linked to such writers as John Barth, Donald Barthelme, and William H. Gass, termed "metafictionists." Metafiction is experimental, self-reflexive, and highly self-conscious. Instead of mimetically representing a reality whose existence is taken for granted, metafiction examines its own existence, its own status as fiction, and, by extension, as a metaphor for all those fictions that the metafictionists believe people have unwisely allowed to rule their lives. Yet, unlike some metafictionists, Coover seems as concerned with preserving narrative interest as he is with disrupting it and more concerned than most metafictionists with the moral consequences of people’s unwillingness to take responsibility for their own mythmaking. Coover employs comedy to express this concern, particularly that of cartoons and silent films: the sudden transformations of the one and the slapstick, pratfalls, and Chaplinesque befuddlement of the other.

The metafictional dimension of Coover’s writing is most overtly present in the collection entitled Pricksongs and Descants (1969) and perhaps most brilliantly if more obliquely, employed in The Universal Baseball Association. Coover’s narrative style's various strains are fully realized in his ambitious and densely woven novel The Public Burning (1977), subtitled A Historical Romance. The difficulties Coover faced in getting the manuscript of this novel published, the hostility of several influential and literal-minded reviewers, and subsequent legal challenges left Coover less than happy with the literary marketplace in the United States. Several of his later works evidence an increasing distance from the general reader. Some—as, for example, In Bed One Night and Other Brief Encounters (1983) and Charlie in the House of Rue (1980)—were published in small editions by even smaller alternative publishing houses.

Other works by Coover include technical aspects that are almost intimidatingly challenging to many readers: the permutational structure of Spanking the Maid (1982), for example, the range of cinematic reference in A Night at the Movies (1987), the "clogged" narrative of Gerald’s Party (1986), and the overtly carnivalesque retelling of Pinocchio in Venice (1991) and Briar Rose (1996). By the late 1980s, Coover had begun to explore the "fabulous networks," "multiplying forking paths," and interactive possibilities of computerized hypertext in first-of-their-kind writing workshops that he had led at Brown University. He also started the Electronic Literature Organization and the International Writers Project. In the 1990s, he presented readers with parodies: John’s Wife (1996) is Coover’s postmodern version of small-town life and the American Dream, Ghost Town (1998) offers his take on the American Western, and The Adventures of Lucky Pierre: Director's Cut (2002) is a futuristic tour de force featuring a porn star in a frozen meta-city. In 2000, Coover was given the Lannan Literary Award in Fiction.

Coover continued his metafictional explorations into the twenty-first century, often experimenting with different forms and genres. His collection The Grand Hotels (of Joseph Cornell) (2002) used poetic language inspired by mid-twentieth–century sculptor Joseph Cornell, while 2004's Stepmother presented takes on fairy tales accompanied by illustrations. Another story collection, A Child Again (2005), repurposed children's literature for unique retellings. He returned to the novel form with Noir (2010), which brought his distinct metafictional touch to the classic detective story format. In 2014, Coover released The Brunist Day of Wrath as a sequel to his groundbreaking debut novel. Coover published Huck Out West (2017), a continuation of the story of Huck Finn and Tom Sawyer, as well as The Enchanted Prince (2018), Street Cop (with Art Spiegelman, 2021), and Open House (2023). He also continued publishing shorter works in magazines such as The New Yorker and Granta. In 2018, Coover also published the story collection Going for a Beer: Selected Short Fictions. After retiring from his regular teaching position at Brown in 2012, he remained associated with the university as the T. B. Stowell Professor Emeritus in Literary Arts.

Bibliography

Andersen, Richard. Robert Coover. Boston: Twayne, 1981.

Coover, Robert. “Interview.” Short Story, fall 1993, pp. 89-94.

Coover, Robert. Interview by Amanda Smith. Publishers Weekly, vol. 230, 26 Dec. 1986, pp. 44-45.

Cope, Jackson I. Robert Coover’s Fictions. Baltimore: The Johns Hopkins University Press, 1986.

Couturier, Maurice, editor. Delta, vol. 28, June 1989.

Evenson, Brian K. Understanding Robert Coover. Columbia: University of South Carolina Press, 2003.

Gordon, Lois. Robert Coover: The Universal Fictionmaking Process. Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press, 1983.

Holley, Emmajean. “Robert Coover: ‘Where It Takes Me, I Have to Go.’” The Brown Daily Herald, 1 Aug. 2014, www.browndailyherald.com/article/2014/04/robert-coover-where-it-takes-me-i-have-to-go. Accessed 10 July 2024.

Kennedy, Thomas E. Robert Coover: A Study of the Short Fiction. New York: Twayne, 1992.

LeClair, Tom. The Art of Excess: Mastery in Contemporary American Fiction. Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1989.

McCaffery, Larry. The Metafictional Muse: The Works of Robert Coover, Donald Barthelme, and William H. Gass. Pittsburgh: University of Pittsburgh Press, 1982.

McCaffery, Larry. “Robert Coover on His Own and Other Fictions.” Genre, vol. 14, spring 1981, pp. 45-84.

Maltby, Paul. Dissident Postmodernists: Barthelme, Coover, Pynchon. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1991.

“The Pleasures of the (Hyper)text.” The New Yorker, vol. 70, June/July 1994, pp. 43-44.

Pughe, Thomas. Comic Sense: Reading Robert Coover, Stanley Elkin, Philip Roth. Boston: Birkhäuser Verlag, 1994.

Scholes, Robert. “Metafiction.” The Iowa Review, vol. 1, no. 3, fall 1970, pp. 100-115.

Williamson, Eugenia. “Robert Coover Prefers to Write in Cafés — in Other Countries.” The Boston Globe, 19 Apr. 2014, www.bostonglobe.com/arts/books/2014/04/19/robert-coover-prefers-write-cafes-other-countries/NGDzkI117CEGnrZ1vInbZM/story.html. Accessed 11 July 2024.