“We need myths to get by. We need story; otherwise the tremendous randomness of experience overwhelms us. Story is what penetrates.”
-- Robert Coover
Tributes have poured in following the passing of Robert Coover, major American fiction writer and founding father of “metafiction” who played a role in the founding of the NYS Writers Institute. He died Saturday, October 5, at a care home in Warwick, England.
Born Feb. 4, 1932, in Charles City, Iowa, Coover's first novel, The Origin of the Brunists (1966), was inspired by a mining disaster he had reported on years earlier when he had a holiday job on his father’s newspaper in Illinois. It centered on the sole survivor of one such catastrophe becoming the focus of a religious cult. One critic called it “an attack on Christianity” and an “explosion in a cesspool,” but it received the William Faulkner award for best debut novel.
The obituary published in The Telegraph with the headline "Robert Coover, subversive novelist whose interests ranged from weird eroticism to fairy tales" -- lists some of Coover's more well-known works:
"His 1996 novel Briar Rose comprised multiple variations on the story of Snow White; Pinocchio in Venice (1991) saw the former puppet returning home in old age after decades as a university professor in the United States. A Political Fable (1967) was a satire in which Dr Seuss’s character the Cat in the Hat runs for the US presidency, while the short story “You Must Remember This” imagined a sex scene between Rick and Ilsa from Casablanca...
"Coover was unabashed about causing minor scandals with his crimes against good taste: for example, with his 1972 stage play "A Theological Position," which featured talking genitals. “I like to be controversial in that way,” he observed in 1986. 'It’s proof I’m alive.'
"One of Coover’s most enduringly admired books was his first short story collection, Pricksongs and Descants (1969). It included a scurrilous take on Hansel and Gretel (his preoccupation with fairytales won him a close friendship with Angela Carter), and his much-anthologised story “The Babysitter,” which delineated several alternative ways in which a child-minding assignment might go horribly wrong." Read more
Coover played a role in the NYS Writers Institute's origin story. In the years before his Pulitzer Prize, his National Book Award, and his MacArthur 'Genius' Grant, novelist William Kennedy was an adjunct professor of English at the University at Albany. He wanted to bring his friend Coover to campus for a talk.
At that time, there was no NYS Writers Institute, no Visiting Writers Series, and no money to bring Coover to Albany.
Kennedy's discouragement eventually led him to found the Institute in 1983 with a portion of his MacArthur funds, and in 1996, Coover came to the University at Albany as our guest. He returned in 2017 for a pair of conversations upon the publication of his novel Huck Out West, which picks up where Mark Twain’s The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn leaves off.
In a starred review Booklist said, “Coover nails Mark Twain’s tone and voice (including the hilarious malapropisms) but, more than that, evokes the deadpan dark humor and social commentary that made Huck’s Adventures infinitely superior to Tom’s....
Coover delivers a near-masterpiece. It’s pitch-perfect and laceratingly funny but also a surprisingly tender, touching paean to the power of storytelling and the pains of growing up.”
NYS Writers Institute, Tuesday, January 31, 2017
In the Associated Press story announcing his death, Hillel Italie wrote: "Coover was often grouped with William Gass, John Barth and other authors of post-modern or "meta-fiction" of the 1960s and '70s. They challenged and sometimes bludgeoned conventional storytelling and grammar, whether through experiments with language, the parody of fairy tales, mysteries and other literary genres or the self-conscious exploration of the writing process. Coover's trademarks included macabre humor, graphic sex, broad takes on everything from baseball to small towns and an encyclopedic range of cultural references."
"Coover’s most controversial work was the 1977 novel The Public Burning, a warp-speed satire of the 1953 executions of convicted communist spies Julius and Ethel Rosenberg that publishers hesitated to take on for fear of legal action by Richard Nixon, Roy Cohn and other then still-living historical figures who appear in the book. Coover alternated chapters about the Rosenbergs with the thoughts of then-Vice President Nixon, who laments his subservient role in the Eisenhower administration and confides to a growing sexual attraction between himself and Ethel Rosenberg." Read more
In his review of The Public Burning, Thomas R. Edwards wrote in The New York Times, "Astonishingly, Nixon is the most interesting and sympathetic character in the story." The Public Burning was shortlisted for the National Book Award.
Praise for Robert Coover
T.C. Boyle -- [Coover had been] “a friend and mentor to me since I was in my early twenties. His first collection, Pricksongs and Descants, opened up a new world for me.”
Edmund White: “Mr Coover, though never innocent or optimistic, is a one-man big bang of exploding creative force.”
Michiko Kakutani called Coover “probably the funniest and most malicious” of the postmodernists, “mixing up broad social and political satire with vaudeville turns, lewd pratfalls and clever word plays that make us rethink both the mechanics of the world and our relationship to it.”
Sam Lipsyte, “He was very much aware of his position as a part of that postmodern movement that was breaking away from American tradition in the novel. That was a big part of his teaching — to expand our mind and make us think about new modes and new approaches” and “to knock us into new places.”
Hari Kunzru, writing in The Guardian described Coover as “refreshingly unconcerned with psychology, sympathy, redemption, epiphanies and conventional narrative construction.”
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