Going For a Beer

Starred review from December 4, 2017
Coover has been testing the limits of fiction for more than 50 years, and his interrogation of story structure and mingling of highbrow postmodernism with pop culture have influenced generations of writers. This collection celebrates Coover’s virtuosity as a short story writer; its 30 selected stories are playfully experimental, restlessly innovative, and a total joy to read. Of course there’s 1969’s classic “The Babysitter,” which famously assembles a kaleidoscopic range of possibilities faced by one teen during a night on the job, and reimaginings of stories from the Bible (“The Brother”), fairy tales (“The Dead Queen”), and film (“You Must Remember This”). But Coover’s genius is his ability to coax profundity from a story that begins, “The cartoon man drives his cartoon car into the cartoon town and runs over a real man,” or create dreamscapes, like the one built out of old celluloid in “The Phantom of the Movie Palace,” that come to seem more coherent in their peculiar logic than our own world. Readers will find the Pied Piper, Snow White, Punch and Judy, superheroes, stick men, a handsome Texas senator attempting to forestall a Martian invasion—and, in “Beginnings,” a writer who migrates to a distant island and shoots himself in the head before going on to enjoy his vacation because “It is important to begin when everything is already over.” This gets to the spirit of Coover’s work, the way it spikes traditional narrative with “spirals, revolutions, verb tenses, and game theory,” always imbued with humor, pathos, and wry intelligence. A career-topping marvel, this collection finds meaning in the wildness of the cultural subconscious.

December 1, 2017
A gathering of short stories by Coover (Huck out West, 2017, etc.), the pioneering maven of postmodern experimentalism.Over seven decades, Coover, who now teaches "electronic writing" at Brown University, has explored many modes of short fiction, from the near-expressionistic to the most disjointed stream-of-consciousness. Indeed, it is with the latter strategy that this gathering opens, with an onrushing story that suggests both madness ("I shout for his boys and for his wife and for anybody inside and nobody comes out 'Goddamn you' I cry out at the top of my lungs and half sobbin and sick and then feelin too beat out to do anythin more I turn around and head back for home") and the biblical tale of Noah and all its divine oddity. The story following it, also from the 1960s, has a comparatively placid tone, even if it turns on horrific flatulence inside an office-building elevator. At the heart of many of the 30 stories collected here are what might be thought of as fractured fairy tales: the gingerbread house that lends its name to one story "is approached by flagstones of variegated wafers," Coover writes, "through a garden of candied fruits and all-day suckers in neat little rows"; the antinomian sisters who, like bears, once visited a deserted island manor and "shat in the soundbox of an old green piano"; the lion who converses with the fox inside Aesop's forest and says that it's "a wise policy...to keep potential enemies where you can either watch or eat them." There's even an odd take on the old "Pied Piper of Hamelin" yarn, complete with nibbling on rats before they can nibble on you. Some of the stories are little-known; some, such as "The Babysitter," much studied, anthologized, and imitated.What was once daring may now seem a little tame, but Coover's influence endures, and this collection provides good evidence for why that should be so.

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