Spanking the Maid – 3/5 Stars One thing I like about Robert Coover is that I take him seriously as a writer, even when he’s being hilarious. This novel isn’t exactly hilarious, though ironic, but still requires me to pay attention to his language in careful ways. The second novel I will be reviewing does so even more. This is a strange meditation on modes of power. Ostensibly it’s the day in and day out occurences in a a domestic battle between a male employer […]
Voom indeed!
This isn’t very good of a novella, but it is really funny and interesting and prescient in its way. For one thing, this was written in 1968 as a kind of farcical tale of desperate Democrat operatives looking for a way to subvert the obvious momentum of Nixon in the wake of RFK’s assassination. And so they nominate the indecipherable Cat in the Hat. And somehow Robert Coover invented Donald Trump years before the would-be shithead was still just dreaming of racially discriminating housing and […]
The Corrupting Effects of Sivilization
Do you remember how the last third of The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn made you hate Tom Sawyer? Well, you ain’t seen nothing yet. Robert Coover takes Mark Twain’s iconic characters, ages them about 30 years, places them in Deadwood just before America’s centennial, and uses them to expose the ignorance, violence and cruelty at the heart of America’s westward expansion. If The Adventures of Tom Sawyer was mostly an adventure story for boys, and The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn a story of the loss […]