February 2013Book I Bought In 2007 And Hadn't Read Yet (As Of January 2013) #1: The Public Burning by Robert Coover"Those who have cast their lot with me shall come to dominion! Those who have cast it with the Phantom shall get their ass stacked!"-Uncle Sam Mine eyes have seen the glory!1953, June 17th, Wednesday: Eisenhower is Superchief, Richard Nixon his right-hand man, Time magazine the Poet Laureate. J. Edgar Hoover, Joe McCarthy, and Billy Graham, great Americans all, have worked tirelessly to root out Communism and godlessness here at home. But across the world the Korean War rages on, Communism spreads unchecked, the Phantom works his dark magic, and Uncle Sam, that star-spangled Superhero sprung fully-formed from the forehead of Liberty to bring freedom to the world and a boot to its behind, has run himself ragged trying to keep up. And in New York, Julius and Ethel Rosenberg, traitors, atomic spies, agents of the Phantom, "thieves of light," are scheduled to be executed--"burned by light" in the electric chair--before the eyes of the entire nation in Times Square on their fourteenth wedding anniversary, Thursday the 18th.The stage is set, the crowds have gathered, the switch just itches to be thrown, but hark! With mere hours to go, with all appeals exhausted and the Supreme Court gone fishin', that dirty traitor William O. Douglas slithers back to the holy chambers...and grants a stay of execution! The Rosenbergs are saved--and the country doomed! Friends, this is a job for Uncle Sam! And Dick Nixon, of course. Old Iron Butt has enough on his hands corrallin' Congress, but duty (and America!) calls. Can Gloomy Gus save the day? Will the Supreme Court relent? Will the Rosenbergs at last be executed? Can Uncle Sam root out the soldiers of the Phantom? And will Richard Nixon ever get his pants back on?I do mean that last bit. 'Cuz while this may be a glorious book, awesome in the almighty sense, a powerful rip-roaring yarn, it has a wee tendency to be mighty goddamn frustrating. Coover has a way of drawing out a scene, which ordinarily ain't so bad--just read that prologue and weep, ye sinners--but when Uncle Sam gets to sermonizin', or Tricky Dick Nixon goes golfing or gets caught with his pants down (twice!), time itself starts looking at its watch. (And if Nixon's pants were to fall down while golfing, hell, the goddamn universe might have to call it quits.) And those last hundred pages before the Rosenbergs get frizzled seem almost endless, as the country gathers in Times Square, the Supreme Court goes wallowing in elephant shit, and Iron Butt does his damnedest save the day--but oh, dear friends, all those sins can be forgiven, yessir, because this is one helluva book. When Coover drags it out, hold on to every word--'cuz when he's on fire, hell, ol' Julie and Ethel aren't the only one's who'll burn.Or maybe that's just me. I was feelin' demoralized and lookin' for something to pick me up last month after failing, in quick succession, to read DFW and M. Proust. Here comes Infinite Jest--and it's steeeee-RIKE one! Swing and a miss! The pitcher winds up and throws out Swann's Way--steeeee-RIKE two! Ol' Jacob's not doin' too well and he doesn't have any balls, could this be the end of the season for him already? Should he try to get hit and walk? Does he even know anything about baseball? Too late--the pitcher's just thrown The Public Burning--and he hits it! He knocks it out of the park! Yahtzee! Goal! TOUCHDOOOWWWWNNN!Or whatever. You get what I'm saying.So this book came at the right time, I'd say--and thank Sam for that. But some books are like that. Most books you can read whenever, but others come at a right time: I needed a Gaiman my Junior year of high school, and Neil's Sandman series was the right one for me; China Miéville knocked my socks off a year later and freed me from the same-ol' bloated fantasy novels I'd been mired in for years; in 2006, as I was half-assing my way through a creative writing course at UW-Baraboo, John Irving showed me what real writing looked like in The World According to Garp; and just last year I lost my socks again to Moby-Dick, a great white whale still pure and uncorrupted by any English teacher's soiled touch. [And then there are the books at come at the wrong time, too early (I was not ready for War and Peace, and probably the same could be said for David Foster Wallace and Proust) or just too late (I think I missed the window for Catcher in the Rye and Pride and Prejudice, and if I had access to a time machine I would go back to Junior year, snatch those Sandman graphic novels out of young-me's grubby paws, and make him read Of Human Bondage instead: "Look, you stupid little shit, another artist type who loves a girl who loves a German! Read it and grow the fuck up!"), but those are stories for other times, 'cuz I've digressed too long, sorry.]And then there's this magnificent bastard. Ok, so Coover didn't move me or change my life like Irving or Miéville or (what was I thinking?) Gaiman, but it was still a much-needed pick-me-up after getting clobbered by IJ and ISOLT. Could I have read it another time? Sure, maybe--but maybe not. Because I bought The Public Burning almost seven years ago, in 2007, age twenty (some of you just winced), because it sounded interesting...but if I had tried to read it then, in 2007, age twenty (rub it in, why dontcha), I would've been stomped on harder than I was last month by those other chunky books. This was not something I would--or could, probably--have read back then. Irving and Miéville and some others aside, I wasn't much of a reader. Hell, I only started keeping a reading log that year, and looking back (with a shudder), I don't see much worth boasting about. Irving and Miéville show up, yeah, as well as one J. G. Ballard, The Death of Ivan Ilyich, and Bull & Brust's unappreciated Freedom & Necessity, but aside from those I can't really say I read many good books in 2007......but I bought some good ones. I was just getting hooked on bookstores then, and I picked up some interesting stuff. Some Homer, some Ovid, plenty of mythology and philosophy and history, Laurence Sterne and Heinrich Böll, Cervantes, Robert Tressell, and others, including this. I bought a bunch of good books...but I haven't actually read them yet. There's a full list right here. Coover's is the first one I can check off. The others I need to get to, along with the 2006 list, over the next year or two. It seems like a fun little project, dontcha think?The only question is, WHAT'S NEXT?
Robert Coover recently published The Brunist Day of Wrath, revisiting earlier territory in a highly anticipated (by hundreds at least) mammoth new novel. One of the thoughts I had reading The Public Burning was that Coover could have easily returned to The Public Burning by looking at a recent era in American history. Imagine a novel where a Vice President named Dick, a cynical operator and foil to a relative political amateur from Texas, is seduced by the idea of becoming the living incarnation of Uncle Sam. A man who views a recent crisis as losing a war with the evil that puts the country’s very way of life in jeopardy. As the machinations of Uncle Sam create a scenario for the destruction of another country in order to turn the tide against The Phantom (which has turned from communism to radical Islamists), Dick discovers that the evidence supporting the martyrdom of an entire country is dubious at best. In a late night cram session going over the evidence, Dick realizes that the yellow cake rumor is horseshit, the satellite images of mobile facilities for the production of weapons of mass destruction are just a collection of trucks in the desert, and the UN monitoring teams led by Hans Blix were right on the money when they said Iraq no longer had major stockpiles of WMDs. In this moment the seeds are sown for an examination of Dick Cheney wrestling with his demons, whereby he eventually falls in love with the people of Iraq and makes an eleventh hour attempt to save them from the pain and destruction that will follow the shock and awe of Operation Iraqi Freedom. Imagine a novel where Dick is humanized by the conflict between his nationalism and the truth that Uncle Sam is perpetrating the murder of innocents to further his fight against the Phantom. A novel in which we might even feel sympathetic to a politician that most Americans view as a ruthless power seeker who would not think twice before abusing that power to further his own agenda. Naw… Coover is a great writer, but he’s not a miracle worker. Coover DOES manage to work wonders with the character of Dick Nixon. The sections with Nixon were the highlight for me, a man who has become a caricature in American history. Coover skillfully displays the inner workings of Nixon: the man’s need for privacy and inability to connect with others on a personal level, his feelings of not measuring up, of being an outcast because of his upbringing in rural California and the effects of losing two brothers in childhood and his mother’s estrangement due to illness. Along the way, Coover examines the Nixon biography through the eyes of his main character. We see a man who is known as a grind (Ol’ Iron Butt), a man whose romantic intentions are seldom met with enthusiasm, the greatest bench warmer any football team has had this side of Rudy, a master debater, the actor of community theater, and the man who cut his political teeth as an Early Warning Sentinel in the fight against the Red Scare by taking down Alger Hiss.The tougher sections of the book highlight the American Superhero Uncle Sam in his fight against the Sons of Darkness and the Phantom. The embodiment of America is shown to be a shifty profiteer and speaks in a form of English referred to in Blazing Saddles as “Authentic Frontier Gibberish”. Included in many of the scenes leading up to the Public Burning are fictional characters such as Betty Crocker and living ones such as Edgar Hoover, Joe McCarthy and Gary Cooper. My favorite cameo from popular culture is by William Faulkner, who is asked to give some words on page 420. Another scene I particularly enjoyed is the slapstick involving the Supreme Court Justices who vacated the stay of execution and can’t seem to find their way out of a giant smear of dung left behind by the Republican Elephant. These scenes feature Coover at his most fantastic and satirical. In fact, I found his satire hitting home with me and succeeding much better than Barth’s Giles Goat-Boy . The Intermezzo scenes are in the format of a speech, a play or dramatic dialogue and an opera. These sections show Coover’s playfulness as do other typographical shenanigans in the text and scenes where the characters show an awareness of being actors in a play. My second hand first edition included a bit of ephemera from 1977, a receipt for payment of dental services from a dentist in Flint MI to an assumed previous owner named Gary. For those who don’t like postmodern writing, The Public Burning might feel like a trip to the dentist. For those who do…it might feel like the best carnival ride you’ve been on in years. Either way, it is worth dipping your toe in and deciding which camp you belong to.
What do You think about The Public Burning (1998)?
SPOILER ALERT: Coover takes on an epic story from the annals of recent history--the Rosenberg executions--and has written a dense and nearly impenetrable and exceedingly boring novel about a fascinating and polarizing topic. The only positive was that he got inside of the head of Richard Nixon as a character and in the final scene had him sodomized by the embodied presence of all the past presidents. I'd heard there was a monumental ending and stuck with it for that, hence a star for the Nixon character and a star for the final set piece. The rest of it sucked!
—Ron
This is an extraordinary novel, and contains some of the most sustained, inventive, furious satire I have ever read. So why only 4 stars? Well, while there are sections that would fully deserve the full-fathom-five, it was just too much rage to be sustained over a 500 page, tiny-type, novel. Writing in fury is hard, it has a tendency to take over the prose, and it can become a little baggy and unfocused as a result. Some judicious editing might have made this work better for me, though I cannot think of a single section I would want to remove.
—Jonathan
HOLY COW, this is a crazed, carnivalesque masterpiece. Coover brilliantly recreates the Rosenberg execution and the Red Scare of the early 50's, zooming in on both the major and minor players in the case with a level of exuberance and intense detail that usually only someone like Thomas Pynchon is capable of. And at the center of it all is then vice-president Richard Nixon, weirdly humanized but still impossibly self absorbed and self-pitying, his mind running at a paranoid, invective filled pace that would ultimately be his undoing. I'm just going to say, this is the greatest fictional portrayal of Nixon ever rendered. Even the head-in-a-glass-jar in Futurama can't compete with Coover's take on his exuberant misanthropy and self-serving nature. That he ends up forming the sincere, reflective emotional core of this book while still being ridiculed is a remarkable satirical feat. At times the book reads almost like a comic, with it's bright swirl of colors and it's crazed American Zeitgeist set pieces which just keep building up into ever more elaborate, ever more ludicrous renditions as the narrative rushes to its electrifying, (pun intended) ordained spectacle of conclusion. And just when you think things have reached their crazed end, Coover ratchets things up to 11 with a denouement so obscene, so completely bat-shit insane, that…well, I almost can't believe that this wasn't burned in the streets when it came out. This is American satire on a hysterical, almost mythical scale, and it goes out with all guns blazing. If Herman Melville and Mark Twain had a kid and that kid was raised by Thomas Pynchon, he would write something like this. I highly, HIGHLY recommend this.
—Jeremy
