Coover is a master, and this is his masterpiece of short story writing. these reworkings and absurdist tales are so well written and funny that i've been obsessed with this book for over ten years (i may have some problems!). read it.

_Pricksongs and Descants_ (P&D) is the book which seems to have inspired Robert Coover's current book _The Awakening_ (please refer to http://search.nytimes.com/books/97/02/16/reviews/970216.gorra.html for a NY times review.)

In P&D the reader will find one of the best examples of metafiction ever created. Metafiction can loosely be characterized as those fictional works that force the reader to reevaluate the role of the story they are reading, the role of themselves as the reader, as well as the role or function of the storyline and the characters themselves. It allows the reader examine a story in terms of how it relates to it's genre and the elements associated with that literary classification. Metafiction enables the reader to contextualize (and decontextualize) the roles of a particular story and it's necessary elements.

Coover examines classic tales such as Sleeping Beauty, The Babysitter, and Jonah & the Whale, reinterpreting them into new forms. What are the possible tales within each tale? With each possibility, what becomes of the original tale? The reader is left to interpret and reinterpret, considering new relationships within or between the stories. Further, the reader his/herself may well question their role in reading each of these well crafted tales. Questions arise such as, "why do we keep retelling these stories?, what makes these stories good? ...why do I find my self compelled to keep reading this?"

In the metafictional tradition (as much as one might argue anything like a tradition might exist here) of Marquez, Calvino, Borges, Pynchon, Barth and Bartheleme, Coover has staked out his own territory. P&D is a wonderful read, and a great introduction to metafiction for those who haven't read anything like this before.

It's probably safe to say most people haven't read anything like this before. Which is one half the reason this book is so appealing: It's (probably) unlike anything you've ever read. The other appealing half of P&D is the effect reading it will have on you: it's exhilarating, thought provoking and inspiring.

I give P&D a 10 and highly recommend this collection of metafiction for both newcomers to this "new tradition" and those familiar with it as well.

--Pete Wendel

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.

This is a very intelligent, beautifully written book; yet, for me, there just was not enough natural momentum to carry the whole thing off. Time...one of the main obsessions in the life of this novel, and the idea of Time being nonexistent, and ever the same with only spacial relations changing is one that is dwelled on by some of the characters. And that's the problem with this novel, with the idea of time thrown out the window every page read the exact same. Read any 30 pages and you will enjoy them immensly but to keep it up for 300 pages is more stamina than i could produce.

There were so many funny scenes though!! But, like a David Lynch movie, after awhile the bizzarities just become repetitive and annoying, with nothing deeper underlying them. Some of the kids from Coover's generations (Barth, Vonnegut, kind of Barthelme) seem to do things that would be more fun to think up and write than to actually read. With these guys (i hate to group, but oh well) you can almost always imagine them slyly smiling behind the page at their zany little creation or attack on the prevailing form of fiction. It often comes off as too academic.

At the same time not at all... there is way more chaos and madness than most uptight, imaginitively limited professors could ever handle, brimming in blood, unsound meditations, dizzying desire... i guess i dont know what to think about this novel... i kind of think Coover may be one of those writers who sometime down the road i will want to scream at myself for ever criticizing.

"Gerald's Party" depicts a single evening in the life of Gerry, a married man who has opened his home to a flood of strange friends, and describes the chaotic string of strange events which occur. The book is written in real time, its 300 pages comprising a single narrative, unbroken by chapters, from the party's beginning to its end. Gerry is the narrator, proceeding from event to event, unable to control anything, and hardly able to understand anything, including himself.

The book is experimental, but does have a plot, concerning a murder-mystery at Gerry's party of strange guests. The story is told in the tradition of surrealists, however, and not a straightforward narrative. Once the reader settles into understanding how the story works, it becomes a joyful romp through mad times.

The theme of the book is very simple: life is a major mess, and it just keeps going. People eat and drink, sleep and sex, live and die, digest and waste, kill and protect, mate monogamously and share polyamorally, control themselves and let themselves go, have children and have fun, grow up and act childish, dirty and clean, dress and undress, lie and speak true, think scientifically and think artistically, fantasize and live pragmatically, search for philosophical meaning and live hedonistically for today. And they never stop! Robert Coover pushes all the buttons in the psyche of the human animal, as if writing a reference manual for an extraterrestrial, telling it: "Here's humanity. Welcome to it!"

This book is experimental and surreal, but arguably more accessible than Beckett, and certainly more earthy and explicit. (This is so Coover can push all your buttons.) It uses an interesting form of dialog occasionally: two or three different conversations interweave their lines, making it a joyful challenge to follow along, and creating interesting intersections at times. There are two dozen characters, all with their own independent dynamic, and Coover mixes them with entertaining effect. Some are consistent, such as the wife, the son, the mother-in-law, and others, who exercise their own unique idiosyncracies steadily throughout the book, like pschological points of reference interweaving with the other characters.

This book is very well done. I cannot praise it highly enough. Coover deserves immense credit for pulling it all off. Once the reader understands the story is meant to be absurd, not literal, it becomes great fun, very vivid, and memorable. Coover is extremely imaginative, and "Gerald's Party" is a fantastic riot.

In my journey through the landscape of contemporary post-modern fiction it was about time that I paid some attention to Coover's work. Based on the reviews of his novels at Amazon, I decided to give this book a try. ...

Gerald's party is a prime example of postmodern metafiction. The story and its plotline function as mere vehicles for the exploration of a number of ideas/concepts, while the fiction is expertly geared towards the reader experiencing this wild party.

Integrating elements from two movie classics -a lot from Fellini's Satyricon and a little from Ferreri's La Grande Bouffe- injecting copious amounts of de Sade in the "party scene" from Gaddis' Recognitions and appropriating the play within a play concept from Hamlet at its zenith, Gerald's party uses theatre and time to analyze the process of perception and its resulting reality. In addition, Coover provides the reader with an encore that ranks high on the list of most cynical analyses of human relationships on record.

Coover has done a masterful job of throwing the reader in a party that has too much of any imaginable thing. While reading the discourse provides a lot of fun, it takes an effort not to get lost throwing darts in the basement. Yet, this is the work of an evil genius and finishing it left me with a feeling of awe for it's creator, while not necessarily agreeing with Coover's philosophy.

So prospective reader is this a book for you? In case you belong to the fans of Fellini's masterpiece and/or have enjoyed works by Gaddis/Pynchon/Wallace/de Lillo, I would certainly join the party.

Robert Coover's first novel, Origin of the Brunists, shows how he won so many awards for his poetry and short fiction. This is a book you won't forget. The book throws a strange group of definitely substandard people together, adds a set of bizarre events, shakes, and comes up with the most bizarre - but plausible - religion you have ever seen. Metaphysics, virtual Forteanism, downright stoicism, you name it, it gets thrown in and sort of works. The book is a study of the individuals, not the religion, but the religion serves to hold the people together. I haven't read this book in 15 years, and I'm aching to get another copy. If you like this book, try Coover's Universal Baseball Association - J. Henry Waugh, Prop., or a collection of his poetry and shortstuff, Pricksongs and Other Delights. At least one of these is in print.

Having read Coover's later books, I was rather skeptical if his earlier ones would be as good - and was pleasantly surprised. In fact, I would rate Coover's first novel as his best work: taut, earthy and powerful, it chronicles the rise and fall of a cult group called the Brunist (following the name of the so-called founder of the group, Giovanni Bruno) and how even a small, seemingly harmless and insignificant group of people can become potentially threatening to the larger community. But what I truly admire about this novel is the slow, subtle building of the narrative terror and hysteria. Coover is indeed a master of suspense and anti-climaxes, building up very tensed episodes to end them in slick, sometimes frustrating, bathos. But this only makes the novel more rewarding as the reader is never on solid ground. The prose continuously shifts and distabilises the reader's suppositions, making it almost impossible to stop reading (this is not an exaggeration). I highly recommend this electrifying novel and hope that it will reach a very wide audience.

Since we see so many extremes in regard to this wonderful short novel, I thought it only fair to add my 2 or 3 cents worth. Like the others here I read UBAI in college, and it served as a opening door to another country of literature. Coover, along with DeLillo and Pynchon, is one of of our late 20th century masters taking, fiction into new realms, and exposing us to alternate ways of viewing our environment and personal relationships. Waugh creates an ordered universe that spins out of his control, moving in directions he never intended. From this, his whole (real) world falls apart; his fantasy world destroys what little relationship he has reality . J. Henry Waugh (read Jahweh) is a flawed God with a (now) flawed creation. This is a wonderful book, but not near as good as his masterpiece, The Origin of the Bruinists, which predicted modern day apocalyptic religious cults and the manipulation of media. Unfortunately this book is now out of print.

This is a book I first read tweny years ago, and still find a reason to re-read it again every few years. This tale about a man who blurs the lines between his dice baseball game and reality is moving and sad. Why no film has been made of this book is a mystery to me. It is a quick read, but one that will leave you thinking about the book once you are done. Poor Henry Waugh and his demons, or stars, from his viewpoint strikes me as a dark, sad man, yet content in his world, or the world he made for himself. Highly recommended.

Like Malamud's "The Natural," Coover's "The Universal Baseball Association" uses baseball to explore mythology, religion, and the nature of belief. While Coover manages to successfully incorporate all of these, however, the novel meets the first command of great literature: the story stands on its own.

The protagonist, J. Henry Waugh, is one of modern American fiction's great creations, a lonley man who spends most of his time in a small New York apartment obsessively ruminating over his great creation: an elaborate dice/board game that serves as the playing field for his Universal Baseball Assn. Waugh plays a full season of games, keeps detailed statistics on each player, and fully documents the history of his league (including the lives and deaths of his "players").

The novel turns on Henry's (godlike) intervention into the game's natural course (ruled by the dice) after the death of a young pitcher in whom he has invested his emotions, hopes and dreams. This intervention touches off a series of questions about the nature of God, Man, and Fate. None of these discussions are divorced from the fabric of the story, however. Throughout, our eyes are clearly on Henry, as he slowly deteriorates mentally, the "game" becoming far more real than "real life."

This is a superb book. It will naturally appeal to baseball lovers, but those who don't give two figs about baseball will be caught up in Coover's sophisticated storytelling and will be impressed by his flawless narrative control and his ability to transcend the immediate subject of the novel.

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.

"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.

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.

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 it's 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 los on me.

When The Public Burning was first published in 1977, Richard Nixon was the ultimate political pariah. His public perception, shaped by Watergate and his resignation, was reinforced by Woodward and Bernstein's fictionalized The Final Days, a brutal account of Nixon's disintegrating psyche. Nixon's own memoir RN was perhaps his worst book, self-pitying, incredibly defensive, too weak-willed to be called defiant.

In this context, Coover's treatment of Nixon in this novel is not as cruel as it may appear. Coover gives Nixon a literary soul, self-doubt, knowledge of his private and public sins and an odd desire to be one with the artists and rebels of the world. True, Coover's Nixon bares his bottom in public, becomes the boy-toy of Uncle Sam and is caught pleasuring himself in a most embarrassing moment ... but Coover's over-the-top cruelty to Nixon has a purpose.

Nixon, the man "born in the house my father built" had to make horrific compromises to attain power, then faced the most public humiliation once attaining it. The burden of American power, personified by Uncle Sam, demands more than any humble human can bear. No wonder he finally walked away.

In the wake of the Clinton impeachment, Coover's work has more resonance than ever. Americans ask the impossible of our public figures ... and then we glory in their failings. Coover brilliantly uses cruelty to reveal the sadism in the heart of our body politic.

A brilliant, savage and unrelenting look at what the US is today. Not as subtle as Gaddis, more powerful than Pynchon, a fabulous and terrifying novel which would have made Swift and Joyce proud.

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 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 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.

IÂ'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. IÂ've never seen a book quite like this one, and IÂ'm going to give a copy to everyone I know!

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.

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.

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