COOVER SNEAKS UP ON YOU

 
Robert Coover stands among the most compelling figures of that postwar vanguard of metafictionists—the writer who leaps to mind whenever one visualizes narrative machinery being systematically dismantled and reassembled in maddeningly novel configurations. Spanking the Maid is a deliciously skewed exercise: Coover takes a thoroughly threadbare scenario of erotic dominance and endlessly retells, reshapes, and reformulates it while remaining perversely faithful to the classical spine of erotic writing. The thrill, as ever, lies not in the messy payoff, but in the excruciating deferral—in the taut, agonized suspense suspended between subjects. Coover converts that delay into a terrifying vacuum where sensory perception offers no foothold for self-empowerment.As for The Universal Baseball Association, it comes as close to the Great American Novel as anything of genuine consequence published over the last half-century—or at least anything I have encountered. Meanwhile, The Origin of the Brunists possesses a terrifying potency; Coover’s rendering of apocalyptic cultishness is every bit as formidable as DeLillo’s or Pynchon’s, and perhaps, in its relentless obsession, even more so.