A Furious Dance
On Open House and the Legacy of Robert Coover
When a writer passes away, whose words transcend any persona they (or the media) may assign, obituarial summation pales in comparison to their bibliography. In the case of Robert Coover, the best eulogy is to read his work, re-examine it, not so much engage with the memory of the human being. Still, people try to encapsulate him with various degrees of failure. The flaccid headline I came across on social media read: Robert Coover, Inventive Novelist in Iconoclastic Era, Dies at 92. Inventive…as if he were an obscure tinkerer mumbling away in his basement. A cutesy niche gem of a writer pushed to the dusty corner of a lit bro’s one-bedroom grad school apartment. Several articles even veered into condescension, declaring he never found wide readership—but qualified this observation by implying this was because of a furious, experimental, metafictional ethos. If ever there was a wordsmith who exemplified how too many noteworthy American authors tragically slip into the literary subterranean, it was Coover. And even he was arguably the most acclaimed post-modernist living in the shadow of Thomas Pynchon, having carved out a following of impressionists like me.
I won’t mince words. I have no shame in saying I am a Robert Coover fanatic. I am in a shrinking—often odiously pretentious—blob of giggling weirdos aspiring to achieve a semblance of his literary versatility. My own writing reeks of his influence, and I have no substantive defense if a fellow Cooverian accused me of composing fan fiction. Not a week before his passing, I watched a 2014 video of him reading The Frog Prince at the Center for Fiction, gleefully reciting portrayals of cunnilingus and amphibious MDMA. Though he dealt with cerebral, zany premises, his fiction, on the whole, is delightfully accessible. It pulls you along. Weaving rhythms of punchy, synaptic prose begging to be read out loud. He repurposed tales like Sleeping Beauty (but with a nefarious twist) and shattered post-war nuclear family dynamics in his masterful short story The Babysitter. I wish I had picked him up at an earlier age so I could be steeped further in his mischievous style during a more impressionable time in my life. His work deprogrammed my preconceived notion of fiction. A palette cleanser for an upstart scribbler with a venomous bend.
America lost a prolific narrative chemist whose lab never imploded or atrophied because he didn’t buy into corporate literati or smelled his own farts. Though an academic, he was a fringe citizen. He served as Professor Emeritus in Literary Arts at Brown University for over a decade but never tenured, and besides the occasional reading, lecture, and conference (many you can still find online), he spent the majority of his life simply writing: over two dozen books with many uncollected fictions in various literary publications.
He is immortal for subverting the conventional short story where the Cat in the Hat runs for office and a maid gets spanked daily for failing to do her job. He also gained notoriety in the paranoid Nixonian era by casting Tricky Dick as hero in The Public Burning. A brilliant satire often overshadowed by the publishing industry’s attempt to suppress the novel out of fear the disgraced former President would air legal grievances. No matter the setup, existential dread and emotionality shine through the idiosyncrasies to present deeply relatable characters from the outer realm. We are all human, we all have quirks—and someone (at some point) loved us. Coover extends such affection to his wartiest ogres.
But I argue his finest and most underrated contribution is his staggering readability when conveying dense themes that seep into the mind rather than hammer into the forefront. Where our loose associations of dreams, nightmares, even subconscious desires, are elegantly, and sometimes oh-too-truly, reflected on us. I could cite a multitude of meditative, yet wide-ranging passages followed by crass dialogue or vitriolic interiority without coming across as disjointed or juvenile, but I will cite the following example from Open House (OR Books, 2023), his final novel. For context, the narrator (one of them, anyway) is at a party.
Not sure how I got up here. I remember going for a round of golf, and then something happened at the ninth tee. The country club bar is there, of course, so at the ninth tee something usually happens. I fell into a sand pit over my head there one day, came up for air, and found myself on a desert island, which was also the tenth green, a delicious hallucination which included a bevy of beautiful young ladies crooning love songs, but one which all too quickly dissolved into a ceramic stool in the men’s room where I sat over runny poo, forlornly humming one of the songs the girls had been singing, and worrying about how my head was working. Or not.
The humor coats the worried fidget of a lost mind—and makes palatable the truth of our frailty. But this existential tension emerges only after traveling through the final sentence rather than knowing the premise from the outset. Many critics superficially chalk up this approach to being dirty for the sake of dirtiness. I argue he explores the anxiety of our mortality by deconstructing the façades of society and self-image—a whimsical portrayal being a vehicle to convey the reality of unreality with a curled smile. He focuses on closing artistic gaps normally buffered by pretension to achieve new experiences, not just in style, but in form itself.
Learning of his death in October 2024 while vacuously browsing the doom-gloom slideshow of the internet is a fitting irony. Receiving news of this pioneer’s demise from a digital messenger befits the legacy of one stationed at the forays of digital literature. Of course, Coover did not trumpet the cesspool of today’s internet, yet electric literature previewed a framework for the current social media aesthetic. Before this algorithmic dependency on search engines, outrage bait, and A.I. models, he encouraged the use of hypertext: non-linear, narratively limitless work occupied by readers and writers experiencing free-associating fiction by clicking scatterboard text links and multimedia, undoing the apparent confines of print fiction. Early advocates predicted it would replace print altogether and elicit this new, cooperative aura in literature. Readers as contributors and writers as mapmakers rather than prescribers of narrative.
Through evangelizing hypertext, Coover wanted to bring fiction into the Millennium the same way Gutenberg gave language to the masses. He conducted college courses requiring the use of immersive software, also known as cavewriting, tooled with GIF imagery, video capability, and embedded sound to reinvigorate the craft. While there are still practitioners such as Cult. Magazine contributor Richard Holeton, author of Figurski at Findhorn on Acid, hypertext never achieved commercial literary commonality. From this continuously reinventive experience, internet architects—regardless of whether they knew it or not—colonized hypertext and molded a dark-side parallel: a web of media addiction, our minds a profit-motivated funhouse mirror of copious porn in which there is no exit, and—contrasting a pillar of electric literature—ultimately no fun. It is bitterly ironic he became part of this diseased tapestry when news of his death entered the algorithm. A future we all dread as we continue to avatar ourselves into sedentation.
Like the prevailing impact of exploring hypertext, the World Wide Web hosts infinite triggers and diversions. Because we are predestined to constantly scroll and swipe, literature at its best is now brilliantly transitory, as impermanent as the texts lost forever in the library of Alexandria. Impactful writing now exists on the same plane as the manosphere, the reactionary politique, the inexplicably impractical thong bikini pic. In the land of clickbait, the linguistic rarely holds the public’s attention. It’s a temple so frequently conquered, hardly anyone knows its purpose anymore, in which retention and emotional kinship with language becomes a misty bog with a rank odor meant to infuriate us. Yet even in that loop of diminishing returns, Coover found freedom to roam in the intellectual decay. Brilliant and transitory would be my primary descriptors for his final novel.
Samuel Beckett, who Coover cited as a foundational influence, reportedly said: Dance first. Think later. It’s the natural order. In Open House, he gives us one more routine, but it is anything but familiar; rather a propulsive, furious, frustrating, invigorating, and often hilarious romp that is all haymaker, no jab. We are given a bare premise like Beckett’s finest dramas Endgame and Not I. On the one-hundredth floor of a Manhattan skyscraper, there is a slow building penthouse party and individuals from all walks of life (and time) converge. The setting is enclosed—limited but continuously expanding. Characters fall over each other to fill the emptiness in vapid futility. For what reason? Does not matter. Can they leave the party? Evidently not. What is the point? Well, that depends on the perspective of each character.
As a chain narrative featuring dozens of uniquely conjured individuals, perspectives shift from one to another, often with no attribution or dialogue. The novel presents the inner lives of purgatorial beings reacting to why and how they are here, in a roomless—but at the same time roomful—ectopia. Music halls, terraces, balconies, a library, theater, gymnasium, grand foyer, messy kitchen, a stairway leading to nowhere, a broken elevator, they move about these crowded rooms in the manner of the novel’s epigraph:
…from quarters unseen, comes a murmur as of bees in the comb…
—Herman Melville, The Confidence Man
After two read-throughs, I was able to discern a few guests at this cocktail party overlooking the Styx: a socialite, a shady business owner, a photographer, a theater director, a philandering real estate agent, a saxophonist, an addict ineptly playing piano, a golfer, at least one gentleman in a cowboy hat who elects to throw people off the balcony, an avant-garde orchestra conductor, a cook hobbling around on crutches, a server handing out hors d’oeuvres while looking for things to steal, a hipster tending bar, a pregnant woman in labor, a victim of child abuse, dancing skeletons, a nun who might be a sex worker, a serial killer, the serial killer’s victim, and one man with an abnormal penis turned green by the nun’s vicious stroking. None of them appear to have a clear reason for why they are here.
We eavesdrop on soliloquies about art, wealth, class, romantic proclivity, and memory. Gatsby-like excess permeates every page without leaning into moral judgment. Moments of intense, graphic violence (including sexual assault) are when the novel is most matter-of-fact, heightening the disturbia, but without delving into binary, spiritual rumination. It is the way things are. Victims recount their trauma detached and without performance because they relive their experience forever, accustomed to the habitual pain. Unappreciated artists walk through the halls and lament obscurity, speaking of their craft as one describes mystic love. The disillusioned saxophonist explains how he was:
…mainly an archetypal dance-on-the-bar screamer and honker back then, honking not only a tool to cover up all the boners, but a route into what I thought of as the Emptiness. It was a state of mind that scared the shit out of me most of the time, but when I was locked in, walking on the spot and bleating away, I felt at one with the universe. Which is also empty. Mindless. Just wanted to disappear into it. Nirvana, man.
But while this is a grandiose sandbox, we are only allowed passing glances at these partygoers. We are eternally pulled in different directions as if attending a drunken soiree. Come here, you just have to meet so-and-so. Whenever one can settle into a voice, here comes another one. In fact, here comes everyone. It is a dance-first approach without imitative fallacy. No disorienting spontaneity. I found myself randomly flipping through this one hundred forty-nine-page pocketbook, descending on new or familiar characters, but did not miss out on any essential portion of the narrative because there is no through-line plot other than they are here at the penthouse. It possesses the free-wheeling, universe-within-itself quality paragraph by paragraph similar to hypertext, only relegated to print.
Maybe this is an absurdist reunion of half-formed ideas fully realized in a metaphorical limbo of creative stagnation, in which bastards come upon the penthouse of Coover’s mind as the lights begin to dim because the bills are long overdue, evoking a penultimate showcase before it all goes dark. At one point, the guests disrobe themselves, unzip their skin suits. One of the many unnamed narrators describes flesh as nothing but a costume for the terrified beast within…All goes smoothly except when the zipper gets stuck, which can be severely painful, to judge by the frenetic rattling of bones. Some discard their flesh as though weary of it, others, planning to wear it again later, fold it up…
Though there might be dissatisfaction in leaving one perspective for another, one can never claim boredom. Coover knew in the 1960s that gone are the days of the throwaway line. Great writing must be propulsive, given a tether to keep the distracted engaged. A ringing sentiment for anyone who dares describe how someone’s eyes smiled at them. Open House is as crackled sentence by sentence as The Universal Baseball Association, Huck Out West, and his Brunist duology, all with the syntactical precision found in the much-anthologized Going for a Beer, where the parameters of reality are discarded, and the only reliable facet of this book is language.
I won’t pretend to know what this book is about in boilerplate terms, but some significance might be gleaned from one character. Periodically, a writer comes onto the scene. More of a silent, awkward observer. Like most writers too-in-their-head, he tries to annotate his surroundings:
If this were one of my stories, I’d probably imagine this penthouse as the melancholic setting for the universal metaphor, the experience of nothingness, afloat in or on darkness. A romantic image, to be sure, melancholy is romantic. My heroines have often endured just such cliches, my readers as well, but I am a romancer and I need familiar old plots, however trite, to help me think, find the words. There are not many of them—usable words, I mean—and all too easily they slip from memory’s feeble grasp. Story makes them less slippery.
The writer—Coover himself?—assigns significance to the void. Yet this Cooverian projection is just as confused as the rest of the party. He embeds himself inside the muck, closing the gap between writer and reader. Not an unfamiliar device, but since most authors use literature as a means of control, they often place themselves atop this man vs. author dynamic, but here the writer has no control, nor dictates any circumstances.
There is one speed with this novel and that is Go. The prose carries and launches from one sentence to the next, requiring to be read one voice at a time yet experienced all at once. Coover plays. Coover dances. And the choreography is never on beat with the reading public’s learned complacency for sanded corner prose. It is a house of cards in the best sense because it relies on every word to press forward—from wherever you start—or else it would be an exercise in stylistic ego-stroking. There is frivolous debauchery, but his prose renders it beautiful and exciting. Even where there is masturbation, it does not read as masturbatory. Before taking the plunge, accept you are in for a ride, and behind the wheel is a laughing conjurer with an alchemical toolbox meant to drill inside humanity’s hive mind, upturn the subconscious iceberg, so that we may see the moldy guts of tropes, and watch him rip the intestinal shackles of tradition. Once you accept you’re at the party like everyone else, you become the only character who can escape the madness, able to say: Wow, what a time.
Matt Gillick is the Managing Editor and a co-founder of Cult. Magazine. He is from Northern Virginia and received his B.A. from Providence College. He currently lives in Connecticut. Recent work found in EGG+FROG, Twelve Winters Journal, and BRUISER. Find more of his published work on mattgillick.com.