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- - - - Robert Coover was my teacher before I ever met him, and his fiction continues to be what I dream of aspiring to: mad, beautiful, inventive, and unprecedented. His collection of stories, Pricksongs and Descants, which I read when I thought fiction was about men in flannel who were below-average hunters and had precisely six words to say to each other, literally unlocked a world to me of blendered language, hyperactive story, and mythology gone wild. He burned the flannel off those hunters, made them speak in weird accents, and killed them off as soon as they got maudlin. Sometimes he also gave them diseases of the ass. The laughter that came out of that book was slightly dark and a bit wet at the mouth—a sinister vaudeville re-creating the history of the world. You could hear the whip lashing at the whole body politic of conservative, safe fiction. It was a much-needed thrashing. When I was finally lucky enough to enroll in Coover’s courses, I encountered a man who was easily, easily, the most generous, rabidly intelligent, accessible, wide-ranging, erudite, and hilarious teacher I have ever met. For a man of his accomplishments to be so kind and committed seemed to me exceedingly rare. He labored tirelessly, and with great insight, at his students’ writing, and he stayed several steps ahead of us with new writers to read and new forms to try. In his many books since Pricksongs, Coover has continued to ignore the distinction between the history of ideas and the history of story. Sexed-up fairy tales, stories refracted through drug-smeared mirrors, nonfictional forms prostituted into novels, the domestic novel turned on its head and emptied, finally, of its dear cheese. He also writes a lot about boners. All the fiction tricks we think are new were built in Coover’s backyard shed. But do not try to visit this shed, because the sparks flying out of it might blind you. Why is Coover particularly important now? Why is his willingness to challenge official stories something that we vitally need today? Take one look at the stories that the current presidential administration is trying to force down the throat of America and then you tell me. Coover’s careful and philosophical skepticisms, his deft eviscerations of official stories, are precisely what we need more of. In his latest novel, Stepmother, Robert Coover hijacks character types found in fairy tales—the Stepmother, the Three Princely Brothers, the King, the Reaper, the Old Soldier, the Ogress—and puts them to new and eccentric use. Like a schizophrenic Vladimir Propp, he begins to splice fairy tales together, and crossbreeds his types to transform the one-dimensional into the ambiguous and complex: the stepmother seems at once good fairy and witch, the ogress bears a remarkable resemblance to Inquisition-era Christianity, and the three brothers are more like frat-boy rapists than potential kings. Coover both turns the fairy tale on its head, and pays tribute to the darkness and unforgivingness that is found in the Grimms’ original tales but which has been boiled out of the Disneyfied versions. Paradoxically, by regressing the fairy tale, he reinvigorates the contemporary novel. Stepmother continues the critique of fairy tales found in Coover’s earlier work, a critique that is part of a larger questioning of the myths and stories that still, even today, subtly inform our lives. For Coover, once a story or myth becomes “official”—once it is a story meant to prove a point, to justify a dominant cultural group, or to justify a way of life—it dies. Yet we continue to try to live by, and justify ourselves through, these outmoded stories and tales. Coover’s earlier revisions of fairy tales—of “Briar Rose,” of “Pinocchio,” of “Hansel and Gretel,” just to name a few—are all attempts to work against official stories, to revitalize the power of a given myth by making it both relevant to our times and dangerous. His approach to myth is the polar opposite of William J. Bennett’s Book of Virtues. Stepmother, despite its focus on a fragmented fairy-tale world, says more, philosophically, about what it means to live in contemporary society than any book set in the here and now. Robert Coover is one of the most original and exciting writers around. Every new book from him is great news. He’s a phenomenal teacher, not only in the classroom, but by example. His dedication to, and knowledge of, writers from all over the world is extremely impressive. And he’s a pretty nice guy too. - - - - To read an appreciation of Robert Coover by Gabe Hudson and an excerpt from Stepmother, click here.To order Robert Coover’s Stepmother, click here.
OTHER McSWEENEY'S FEATURES:
Phriday List Phabulousness!: Books Edition Dispatches From a Public Librarian: Three Tales of the Internet By Scott Douglas John Moe's Pop-Song Correspondences, Volume II By John Moe An Interview with Robert Coover By Gabe Hudson |
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