Robert Coover, who along with Donald Barthelme, John Barth and others occupied the vanguard of postmodern American fiction in the 1960s and 1970s, and who went on to a long and prolific career writing and teaching, has died. He was 92.
He died Saturday at a care home in Warwick, England, his daughter Sara Caldwell told The Associated Press on Sunday. Ms. Caldwell, an author and filmmaker, did not give a cause but said his health had been declining recently.
Mr. Coover’s first novel, “The Origin of the Brunists,” published in 1966 and fairly traditional in its telling, was about a religious cult built around the lone survivor of a mining accident in the Midwest.
In The New York Times Book Review, Webster Schott wrote of its author: “If he can somehow control his Hollywood giganticism and focus his vision of life, he may become heir to Dreiser or Lewis.”
If it wasn’t obvious then that Mr. Coover had no interest in inheriting the kingdom of social realism from Theodore Dreiser or Sinclair Lewis, his 1969 story collection “Pricksongs and Descants” made it abundantly clear. Those stories firmly established his career-long interest in remixing fairy tales, exploding myths and placing only the most transparent window in front of fiction’s inner machinery.
“The Babysitter,” a widely anthologized story from that collection, rifled through the many possible scenarios of one night after a young woman arrives at a house to take care of three children. The brief, fractured episodes range from the banal to the violent and the lascivious, including the fantasies of the babysitter’s boyfriend and of the children’s father. (More than 25 years later the story was, improbably, adapted into a movie with the same title starring Alicia Silverstone.)
The collection also included “The Gingerbread House,” told in fragments that relied on readers’ knowledge of the tale of Hansel and Gretel.
In an interview with The New Yorker in 2014, Mr. Coover said, “I’ve engaged with folk tales and fairy tales all my writing life, as part of my attempted disruption of the myths that environ and sometimes govern us.”
Political myths came into Mr. Coover’s cross hairs in “The Public Burning” (1977), a novel that reimagined the case of Julius and Ethel Rosenberg, the married couple who were convicted of conspiring to steal atomic bomb secrets for the Soviets and executed in 1953.
The novel featured the Rosenbergs and other historical figures, like Richard M. Nixon and J. Edgar Hoover, as well as two mythic characters, Uncle Sam and the Phantom, who represented the overheated rhetoric of Cold War antagonism.
Mr. Coover’s Uncle Sam had the horn-tooting nonsensical dialect of Yosemite Sam, as when he screamed this definition of the Phantom: “a most horrible contwisted embranglement that’ll tar up the earth all round like that Worcester tornado and look dreadful kankarifferous!”
The New York Times’s former chief book critic, Michiko Kakutani, called Mr. Coover “probably the funniest and most malicious” of the postmodernists, “mixing up broad social and political satire with vaudeville turns, lewd pratfalls and clever word plays that make us rethink both the mechanics of the world and our relationship to it.”
Mr. Coover was an aggressive purveyor of puns and other willfully playful devices (he once named a detective Philip M. Noir), a tendency that some critics found both energizing and exhausting.
Robert Lowell Coover was born in Charles City, Iowa, on Feb. 4, 1932, to Grant Marion Coover, a newspaper editor, and Maxine (Sweet) Coover. He attended Southern Illinois University before transferring to Indiana University, graduating in 1953 with a bachelor’s degree in Slavic studies.
He served in the Navy during the Korean War, spending most of his time from 1953 to 1957 as a lieutenant stationed in Europe. He married María del Pilar Sans Mallafré, whom he had met while in Spain with the Navy, In 1959.
In 1965, he earned a master’s degree in the humanities from the University of Chicago.
During his many years as a professor at Brown University, beginning in 1979, Mr. Coover’s students included the authors Rick Moody, Joanna Scott, Jim Shepard, Sam Lipsyte, Ben Marcus and Alexandra Kleeman.
Mr. Coover would alternate a semester of teaching with two or three spent writing. Mr. Marcus, now a professor at Columbia University’s MFA program, said Mr. Coover “thought tenure was death,” and could be “a thorn in the side of the lifers.”
Mr. Marcus described conferences Mr. Coover would organize, filled with notable authors. Obscure presenters initially unrecognized by the audience would turn out to be former students of Mr. Coover’s. “He still held a torch for them,” Mr. Marcus said in an interview for this obituary. “He was still excited by their promise. So he’d get them out of their day jobs to come and read whatever they had.”
Mr. Lipsyte, who also now teaches at Columbia, studied with Mr. Coover as an undergraduate. “He was very much aware of his position as a part of that postmodern movement that was breaking away from American tradition in the novel,” Mr. Lipsyte said in an interview. “That was a big part of his teaching — to expand our mind and make us think about new modes and new approaches” and “to knock us into new places.”
The will to experiment and to question convention never left Mr. Coover. In a 1992 column in The Times titled “The End of Books,” he wrote that he was “interested as ever in the subversion of the traditional bourgeois novel and in fictions that challenge linearity.”
He was elected to the American Academy of Arts and Letters in 1987.
Mr. Coover was prolific and ambitious into late life. In 2014, he published “The Brunist Day of Wrath,” a thousand-page sequel to his debut novel. “Huck Out West,” in 2017, imagined Huck Finn and Tom Sawyer in the Wild West.
It was inspired by Mark Twain’s own intended sequel, “Huck Finn and Tom Sawyer Among the Indians.” “It’s a very problematic work,” Mr. Coover told the radio station WNYC of Twain’s follow-up. “Very racist, very anti-Native American, and so on. So, I thought, ‘That has to be corrected.’”
In recent years he continued to publish stories in The New Yorker, and released two collections of fairy tale-influenced books through McSweeney’s, “A Child Again” and “Stepmother.” In 2021, he published “Street Cop,” a short novel with illustrations by Art Spiegelman.
Mr. Coover’s many other books included “The Universal Baseball Association, J. Henry Waugh, Prop.” (1968), about an accountant who invents, and is driven mad by, a fantasy-baseball game; “Gerald’s Party” (1985), a deconstruction of detective stories in which a guest at a wild suburban party is murdered; and “John’s Wife” (1996), set in a small town where the male residents project their desires onto the spouse of a rapacious businessman.
“There’s nothing necessarily wrong with myths,” Mr. Coover said of his preoccupation with interrogating them, in an interview with The New Statesman in 2011. “We tend to need some sort of sustaining mythic notion or pattern or vision in order to get through each day. We need a little bit of structure to get out of bed, to keep going. But most of it is stifling, in some way corrupting.”
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