Word: executioner
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All this genteel anonymity is about to end. Controversy, if not quality, bids fair to make The Public Burning a major publishing event. An excerpt from the novel that ran last fall in American Review alerted readers to its incendiary subject: the June 19, 1953, execution of Ethel and Julius...
But Coover clearly has more on his mind than a malodorous vendetta. Long stretches of his novel read like a fretful imitation of James Joyce's Ulysses. The author lays out thousands of facts about the early 1950s, in general, and June 17-19, 1953, in particular-from Justice...
In Ulysses, Joyce's catalogue of facts cohered into a unifying myth., Coover's myth requires the diminution of historical figures into pasteboard grotesques; since that much is clear on the novel's opening pages, Coover's torrent of trivia seems like so much padding along...
The character named Richard Nixon narrates nearly every other chapter in the novel, where the best and worst in Coover's method coexist with greatest strain. His portrait of an ambitious, insecure and privately obsessed public man is remarkably comprehensive and even moving. If only the character were not...
The central weakness of The Public Burning can be traced to Coover's attempt to illuminate extremes by making them more extreme. The Rosenbergs' trial and execution were a passionate chapter in an overheated era. Even now, 24 years after their deaths, questions about the couple's...