From William Gass’s introduction to the 1998 Grove Press edition of Robert Coover’s The Public Burning:
“Written in the 1970s, published finally in 1977, about actual and imaginary events of June 1953, it could not be more current, more relevant, more right on than it is now (or whatever date the reader finds herself immured)….
“Our country is as rich in scares as Halloween. They have come in almost every color, and conspiracy theories have not been confined to rural right-wing gun toters. Nor have our politicians been above the use of fright and intimidation to gain votes and influence policy. Assassinations occur with the frequency of business cycles and provide the paranoid with many hours of happy conjecturing…
“Throughout Robert Coover’s career, he has been trying to come to grips with commercial deceit, political lies, and religious myths, the better to strangle them. He empties out fables and received beliefs like frequently used spittoons. His fine first novel, The Origin of the Brunists, concerns the creation of a millennial cult awaiting the end of the world (as here it is an execution). In the Universal Baseball Association, Inc., a sport sets sail for the sacred. His book of stories, Pricksongs & Descants, pops many a cultural cliche, reducing them to raddles of split rubber. Then there is his short play, A Theological Position, (playlets crawl out of cracks in The Public Burning), and several political send-ups like A Political Fable (or, as I prefer, The Cat in the Hat for President) follow it…
“Coover’s prose is occasionally leisurely, like a sailing ship, bobbing along on the waters of history, but then it will shift suddenly into high gear, zip away, and rocket off. Diction rises and falls like an elevator. There are floors for High Art, Religiosity, Bamboozle, and Scatology….
“The book has suffered a seemingly endless series of intolerable blows. Yet in hindsight…in hindsight what a convincing confirmation of one’s work, what joy to have unsettled the nerves, and exposed the craven hearts of so many immoral minions, stalwarts of their glorious high-minded industry.
“Now at last, The Public Burning will reemerge like the groundhog and see its shadow. And the reader will get to know the real Richard Nixon, and learn to understand Uncle Sam, who, even young, was ‘…lank as a leafless elm, already chin-whiskered and plug-hatted and all rigged out in his long-tailed blue and his striped pantaloons, his pockets stuffed with pitches, patents, and pyrotechnics…’ and he will discover just how the world works here, because The Public Burning is an account of what this country has become. It is a glorious, slam-bang, star-spangled fiction, and every awful word is true.”
The full text can be found in William Gass’s A Temple of Texts, published by Knopf in 2006.
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