Coover, Robert
2 total works
Though Coover's message is bleak, his delivery is wonderfully comic (Bharati Mukherjee, The Globe & Mail (Toronto)) in this spare, tantalizing, and perfect book, named by Daphne Merkin in The New Yorker as one of her favorite S/M books.
Robert Coover's wicked and surreally comic novel takes place at a chilling, ribald, and absolutely fascinating party. Amid the drunken guests, a woman turns up murdered on the living room floor. Around the corpse, one of several the evening produces, Gerald's party goes on a chatter of voices, names, faces, overheard gags, rounds of storytelling, and a mounting curve of desire. What Coover has in store for his guests (besides an evening gone mad) is part murder mystery, part British parlor drama, and part sly and dazzling meditation on time, theater, and love.