The Public Burning

Insane, in the best way possible.

It's particularly amazing to think that this came from the mind of one person, long before it was possible to look things up on the internet. It's hard to explain what I mean by that, but parts of the book almost had the tone of a malfunctioning ChatGPT run amok, grabbing phrases, ideas, and images willy-nilly and combining them into a poisonous soup of political satire that is both spot-on and persistently nonsensical. I'm not sure I've ever read a book loaded with so many off-putting and surreally-deployed references to history and popular culture, engineered to make you feel uncomfortable, aroused, nauseous, and amused all at the same time. A document created by a blazing, rage-filled, and insanely show more intelligent magpie with the darkest imagination you can conjure.

RIP Mr Coover. You almost made me feel sorry for Richard Nixon. show less

The horny sensualist trio of Roth, Updike, & Bellow dominated American letters for several decades. Coover belongs to a second later threesome of widely read fantastical writers in the 60s and 70s. The others being John Barth and Thomas Pynchon. My sense is that Barth and Coover are rarely read these days despite the acclaim and prizes they reaped in their heyday. Pynchon gets more lip service and surely more readers these days, but I haven't run to many people lately plunging into V or Gravity's Rainbow, his major opus of the period.

The Public Burning is a surrealistic reimagining of the executions of Julius and Ethel Rosenberg. Staged as a public spectacle in Times Square hosted by Uncle Sam and recounted by Richard Nixon. The show more narrative is very dense and sensational, and stultifying; studded with references to the culture, politics, and history of mid 20th century America. Many of these references will be mysteries to anyone born after the end of the 1950s. In many places the writing is sparkling and insightful but as a whole it tends to be a quagmire. The murder of the Rosenbergs, particularly Ethel, is one of crimes of America that should not be forgotten even if the body count does not approach that of other notable misdeeds. It's hard not to read this hysterical account of a public patriotic celebration without pondering the upcoming 250th July 4th celebration or the recent UFA bout at the White House.

William Gass recounts the brave efforts of a variety of Coover's literary agents to have TPB published in the face legal threats from the Nixon White House and libel threats from other figures appearing in the book. Unfortunately, these efforts seem to have detracted from their other duties of an editor. TPB would have been significantly better if it was significantly shorter. show less

"I am asking everyone tonight to step forward - right now! - and drop his pants for America!"

Some music writer (Lester Bangs? Byron Coley?) said the VU had a lot to answer for, having spawned generation after generation of poor imitations. The Public Burning is a book that never could have been written if Joyce had not first produced Ulysses. Three days instead of one. Nixon as Bloom. It could be execrable. However, Coover pulls it off quite nicely.

The overheated Prologue is the weakest section of the book. If you make it past that bit, you will find yourself engaged with a suprisingly immersive and creative tome. Lots of vernacular and pomo done very well. And, notwithstanding that, a lot of forward momentum in the story line.

Readers show more tend to focus on the politics, but this is first and foremost a Coover take on Ulysses and Finnegans Wake that happens to use as its subject matter Nixon/Rosenberg, not a polemic dynamiting fish in a barrel. Coover does an incredible job conjuring up a radically subjective sense of the reality of the Cold War era as experienced by the Nixon crowd at the same time he parodies it and lays it low. Without that, I don't think the book would be half as interesting, the parody would not work for long, and the constant verbal pyrotechnics and storytelling tricks would lose their lustre. show less

There's a bit of a comfort curve with this one, as outlined aptly in the otherwise gassy introduction by William H. Gass: we're used to seeing Nixon the caricature, Nixon the cackling supervillain, whereas here we get Nixon certainly the venial, the self-justifying, the puffed up, but also the self-loathing, the sensitive, even the smart and ruefully cynical. Nixon the hero of The Public Burning, is a more fully realized character than Nixon, the actual dude, and if that's an accomplishment it also makes you realize how hard it is to abandon the Nixon in your mind and embrace this confused-but-not-yet-quite-monstrous young striver. One thing this book does is posit the Rosenberg trial as Nixon's supervillain-origin story, and with the show more grotesque (and slightly homophobic) fate that he meets at the end, and the fact that you know he's gonna go from that into loss to Kennedy and eight years of exile, all of a sudden the Futurama-Nixon who has a robot body and destroys the galaxy seems a lot more possible.

So you can see that this is not a measured recreation of the fears and hates of McCarthy-era America, not a sober repudiation of the great evil done to the Rosenbergs (Coover flirts with representing it as singular or a loss of innocence, which I find just too simplistic and banal for words); no, it's a sneer, a sharp cutter wielded with eyes lit up by malice. (It's also, as others have noted, a weird interpolation of Ulysses.) In that sense it's powerful, and while I don't get too much on board with the Uncle Sam character (spending too much time with caricature can't help but betray a delight in said caricature on the part of the author), I think that he amply demonstrates his purpose in the final symphony of contempt, which starts with a sexy, repulsive, heartbreaking encounter between Nixon and Ethel Rosenberg in the death chamber--weirdly, the most real part of the whole book: if it was all over for you in a world gone topsy-turvy horrid, you'd cling to anyone you could, even your jowly executioner, just to keep on feeling--but then explodes into what's not only an auto-da-fe, the execution of Ethel and her husband live in Times Square, but also a national pageant of shame and celebration building to a nibelungian climax that has to be read to be believed. There's a little too much self-satisfaction visible when the spectacle recedes below the high-water mark to its stupider lows, but hey, that's Uncle Sam's America. show less

Well holy shit! The last 100 pages of this book REALLY take off! I sort of felt, for the first few hundred pages, that this was more of a 3/5 kind of book. The premise and idea behind it are all 5/5... but the writing and the actual content just wasn't grabbing me. Then... then Nixon visits Ethel in prison, and things really take off. Or maybe it was a little bit before that... regardless, the last 100 pages are 100% phenomenal writing and content. WOW.

Also, it's pretty pathetic how much of this resonates with today. 60 years later, and a lot of the issues that this book tries to address we are still fucking around with. Trump could easily replace Uncle Sam; ISIS/Al-Qaeda could replace Communism... I don't know who would replace Ethel show more and Julius. America tends to kill its U.S. citizens overseas with drone bombs now.
This would all be hilarious if it wasn't so god damn sad and pathetic.

Read this book. show less

Most vicious satire Ive ever read although I had to skip one whole voice or every other chapter (I cannot remember how the book was structured

I read this as part of a Thomas Pynchon group on yahoo in the late 90s. Apparently I was the onlyone who braved this wicked ride. I recall calling my grandmother and verifying historical details.