Mass-market Monday | Robert Coover’s The Public Burning

The Public Burning, Robert Coover. Banatm Books Edition (1978). No cover designer credited. 661 pages.

A 1977 Book Ends column in The New York Times offers a fairly succinct blurb for The Public Burning:

The Public Burning is a blend of fact and fantasy, using dozens of real and fictional names. Among the real persons named in this “metafiction” are President Eisenhower, Senator Joseph McCarthy, J. Edgar Hoover, Billy Graham, Norman Vincent Peale, Edward Teller, Walt Disney, Cecil B. DeMille, former prosecuting attorney Irving Saypol and Judge Irving Kaufman. About one‐half of the novel narrated by Vice President Richard M. Nixon…

The Book Ends piece, which appeared a few months before the book’s publication (and notes the difficulties the book found securing a publisher brave enough to put it out), includes a brief interview with Coover about The Public Burning:

“I had the idea for the book 11 years ago. I thought it would be a novella and not a book of over 500 pages. I felt that the event was something that had been repressed. If you mentioned the Rosenberg case, people were turned off or young persons didn’t know what it had been all about.

“Their execution — plus the prevalence of old‐fashioned American hoopla—gave me the central metaphor for the book. In 1968, I was looking for a narrator. After Nixon was elected President, he served that purpose. He had been a participant in the background of the Rosenberg case. As President, he was powerful, pious and pompous. I needed a clown act to intersperse with the circus act. And so Nixon became the clown. Clowns are sympathetic when you get to know them.”

The Public Burning was the first book I read by Coover, and I read it when I was too young to fully appreciate it; I think I simply wasn’t soaked enough in its history. Revisiting it, even in brief today, reminded me that it’s likely as relevant as ever, and that its diagnoses of the first half of America’s twentieth century is up there with Gravity’s Rainbow or J. R.