Party Chart Universal [CD] { } ~94.02.09 114

The Origin of the Brunists (1966) revolves around numerological puzzles and the antics of mystic sectarians. The Universal Baseball Association, Inc. (1968) is a wildly intricate work built around a baseball "game" — played with dice, charts, and statistics — which progressively devours every person and relationship tangled in the novel's complex weave. The Public Burning (1977) is a fantasist's version of a political novel conceived as a mix of the grotesque and the pathetic, the outre and the sober, the plausible and the impossible, the novelistic and the theatrical. Gerald's Party (1986) is a takeoff on detective stories and an intricately layered romance built around dreams, false leads, and memory. Together these novels constitute an ambitious project driven by irreverence, pride, and sheer joy in the power of language. Such fiction as Coover writes typically features not only elements of pastiche and improvisation but what Robert Alter calls "a cavalier attitude toward consistency" and an "exhilaration of hysteria." Violating formal principles and ordinary (or "bourgeois") decorums, it is by turns arch and slapdash, innovative and innocent ...»