Postmodern genius Robert Coover has died at age 92.
Novelist and short story writer Robert Coover, a master of metafictional and intricately fabulist and experimental literature, died on Saturday in Warwick, England, “surrounded by family,” according to the AP.
He was celebrated (particularly by other writers) for works that used and exploded myths of all kinds—fairy tales, political narratives (his most famous book is likely The Public Burning, a satirical novel about the Rosenbergs), and other invisible frameworks on which we base our everyday lives. In his most famous short story, the brilliant, destabilizing “The Babysitter,” which was included in his first story collection, Pricksongs and Descants, he calls into question the very nature of storytelling itself—and a lot of other things besides.
“The experimental methods which interest Coover, and which he chooses to exploit so skillfully,” observed William H. Gass in a 1969 review of the Pricksongs and Descants, “are those which have to do with the orderly, objective depiction of scenes and events, those which imply a world with a single public point of view, solid and enduring things, long strings of unambiguous action joined by tight causal knots, even when the material itself is improbable and fantastic; and the consequence of his play with these techniques is the scrambling of everything, the dissolution of that simple legendary world we’d like to live in, in order that new values may be voiced; and, as Coover intends them, these stories become ‘exemplary adventures of the Poetic Imagination.'”
“We need myths to get by,” Coover famously said. “We need story; otherwise the tremendous randomness of experience overwhelms us. Story is what penetrates.”
Especially stories like these.
