Robert Coover: An Appreciation

The work of the prolific author Robert Coover, who died on Saturday at 92, stands as a challenge to writers everywhere. In this age of endless recycling and rebranding, the restlessly inventive Coover reminded readers and fellow novelists that giving a middle finger to convention and achieving what might sound fantastic, in life or in art, is a course that many people simply elect not to take, whether through cowardice, willful myopia, or a bit of both.

The New York Tines obituary credits him for “reimagining” folk and fairy tales, which is rather different from calling him original. The piece dwells on Coover’s novels along with one of the stories from his 1969 collection, Pricksongs & Descants, entitled “The Babysitter,” which, as the obituarist notes, pops up in many anthologies. But another story in that volume, “The Elevator,” may in the end be more pertinent to Coover’s identity. 

“The Elevator” is about a cubicle prole named Marty who shows up for work early one morning and decides to take his office building’s elevator down instead of up and explore the basement, which he has never seen in seven years at the same firm.

Not surprisingly, the vast lower level contains dark within dark and little that he can see. But in subsequent scenes, we witness Marty doing all kinds of things not in keeping with his staid habits over those past seven years, such as fighting back against a bully who often gets on his case on rides in that elevator, and commencing a tryst with the young woman who operates it and whom he has always believed to be far beyond his reach romantically. 

Coover juxtaposes bits of these scenes through a literary equivalent of flash-cutting, making vivid and immediate the desires and dreams that have long populated the nether parts of Marty’s subconscious. Gazing into the reaches of the basement, he has made a belated effort to sound those depths and force the question of what rebellion and defiance of his routines might look like in practice. The things that come to fruition were maybe not further from realization than the basement he never explored for seven years was from his desk upstairs.

 As a writer, Coover never let himself get away with intellectual or creative laziness. He dreamt up a tantalizing possibility and then, in the words of T.S. Eliot, acted on an innate urge “to force the moment to its crisis.” 

The story “The Gingerbread House” is a fable about an old man and his two small children who wander in a deep wood and come upon a home with gingerbread walls, peppermint chimneys, and windows laced with meringue. It looks delicious enough to eat, but they fall afoul of a witch who rips out doves’ hearts and holds them out to tempt kids. The hearts glow eerily in the dark. Everything in this surreal world shimmers with a malign beauty. Coover offers some of the creepiest descriptions in any recent short story, one that is not for kids yet might help them absorb one of the most basic rules of all. Don’t talk to strangers.

“A Pedestrian Accident” is about the surreal scene that develops around a man who crossed paths with a truck on a London street. He now lies prone, bleeding, on the brink of death. 

The driver blames the young man for what happened, some in the crowd of onlookers agree, some don’t. A policeman who shows up gets into a tussle with several of them, then with a woman who claims to know the near-pulverized form lying prone on the pavement, bleeding to death. The poor victim still lies partly under the vehicle that hit him. In trying to move the truck off him, they make his wounds even worse, much to the bemusement of the crowd.

Clearly there is a point here about voyeurism and carnage as entertainment, not to mention how decency and honesty to others are so often contingent on circumstance or an arbitrary and self-interested prioritizing of compassion. The driver begs the crowd not to blame him, framing his appeal in terms of the number of mouths he had to feed at home—seven—along with his God-fearing, hardworking character. Coover ratchets up the suspense. The reader keeps fearing the victim will die. When that doesn’t happen, the story poses a question about its protagonist’s ability to value life on any but the highly specific set of terms he has always taken for granted.

Yet any reading of “A Pedestrian Accident” will on some level be subjective. Coover’s work does not lend itself to facile interpretation, and that is the point. He went so far as to disparage labels, including, especially, one that readers with limited knowledge and attention spans have always lobbed at him: postmodernist.

When asked, in an interview with The Believer in 2015, how he felt about that label, Coover has this to say: “Well, none of us liked any terms, because to be categorized is a punishment, not a gift. And whatever the term was, even the most flattering one, it still leaves you feeling like you belong to an abstract notion, not what you’re doing yourself.”

During the same interview, Coover dissects the etymology of the term postmodernism and suggests it is far more useful for the consideration of architecture than literature.

For some of us, the life and work of Robert Coover stand in direct contrast to those of a smug younger generation of American writers. And, in particular, to the likes of Jonathan Safran Foer, who seems to have imagined that the shotgun marriage of a couple of tricky, pretentious, overrated novels with a politically correct public persona makes for a “major” literary figure.

May future generations read and celebrate Robert Coover, the anti-Foer, for as long as literary culture survives.