Robert Coover | Gerald's Party

 

One divine synchronicity from my adult life was when I learned that Robert Coover, my favourite ever American writer of literary prose, prized most highly among his own works the  bawdy and provocative but seldom celebrated novels Gerald’s Party and John’s Wife, neither a work of anything like wide acclaim or popular appeal and surely the novels in which Coover dares to go furthest with dicey gender politics and baroquely obscene sexual shenanigans. Naturally, these two were my favourite Coover novels as well. The most obvious influence from his own earlier existing body of work on short 2023 novel Open House, a work likewise unafraid to get it’s hands dirty and involving a number of sex acts that in reality would additionally be crimes, Gerald’s Party is, despite there being an earlier Coover novel featuring Richard Nixon as a main character, the author’s most biblically belligerent novel, appearing steadfastly committed to taking no prisoners—to imagining a living cesspool…and building it up…so as to fluff it up. Many will not wish to take this trip to terminus. Woe unto them. But who could blame them? Sex and violence, death and its alarming odours, worked into our very helices, in no small part define us; they are indeed the repressed of the domestic scene itself, daddy’s implicit rampage, but we are not used to having these forces and their forensics unleashed in such a way, used to beat and assail us, but with great mirth as at a carnival, and we are certainly not used to this level of abhorrence played to ear-piercing bellows of pagan laughter. There are many chortles here, but, by God, many of them ought catch in the throat, no? It is too easy to see this great spastic palimpsest as another postmodern intertext, playing on the parlour drama and/or ten-little-Indians murder mystery, but this shredded obscenity spaghetti works at the most abstracted and theoretical levels. There is a detective on the scene—he’s more nightmare Borges than pomo Poirot. Literature is a great big page-to-page real time spill of appalling luminous colours. It is way off in another realm where even the most basic measurements are taken differently. Imagine that it is you who is both obscene and has no crime for which to answer. We laugh heartily and do madly concupiscent things. Sands through ye ole hourglass, me hearty. The hilarious sound of loudly evacuating bowels in the lavatory is what permits and allows for what is fundamentally high-mided and immanently scopo-worlded in us. We find in Gerald’s Party and then John’s Wife a combination of dreadful sin with cartoony hew and persistent questions ontological, epistemological, correlational, and ultimately relating to the higher categories of aesthetics and spirituality. We grapple with time, the whiff of time, the domain of theatre, truth, beauty, identity, love, and Whac-A-Mole. In Gerald’s Party and John’s Wife, malevolent inhuman farce is a vertiginous and vertigo-inducing tent-show balancing act. It goes considerable and eminently impossible distances to evoke radical, cascading, sensory, many-partied simultaneities. There’s a huge cast and it is a night sky full of twenty zillion billiards balls. I can only imagine how exhausting and laborious a book as systematized as Gerald's Party must have been to write. It would be comparable I should imagine to building a log cabin by yourself in the mountains. Probably Coover's most exhausting and laborious book up to the time of its publication. He’s one of those postmodern conceptualists who isn’t going to accept an idea that fails to threaten to beat his ass and lay him flat…or leave him forever Master of the Forever Domains because miracles do sometimes happen after all. And you have to go a little mad in order to punch a slimy Golem out of a sepulchral birth canal. Apparently if you bring freaks people show up and buy bag after bag of peanuts. This shit ain't pretty and it sure weren’t never meant to be. And I never called this big and brawny illicit book a masterpiece, partner. Blunderbuss, is what I said. Blunderbuss. “Still, the flying saucer books were fun to read and there weren’t nearly enough of them to suit me,” muses the ribald and hardboiled Jimmy Burns in the Charles Portis novel Gringos. “I liked the belligerent ones best, that took no crap off the science establishment.” I think you could make a case that the systems novelists like Charles Dickens, Honoré de Balzac, Raymond Queneau, Georges Perec, Thomas Pynchon, Robert Coover, and Joseph McElroy are always performing theoretical and clinically antiseptic acts of imaginary terrorism imagined in scales or degrees, the idea being to ultimately attain through totally imaginary acts of civil disobedience and decisive infrastructural sabotage the full rumbling heights of erotic plentitude (om). And Don DeLillo’s no doubt settled into the rhythm of whatever congruent vein of liquid gold he’s working at the present tempestuous hour. Tee hee. Saluto. 

And peg thee in his knotty entrails till / Thou hast howled away twelve winters.