John’s Wife (Robert Coover)
Robert Coover is one of the most amazing, incredibly influential writers you’ve probably never heard of. I know I was only introduced to him in college during one of those American Fiction survey courses with a textbook four inches thick covering the classic, modern short stories: Shirley Jackson’s “The Lottery” or “The Celebrated Jumping Frog of Caleveras County” by Mark Twain. Coover’s classic is “The Babysitter,” a story that in retrospect I didn’t understand all that well. The tale shifts perspective constantly and explores all the threads of the possible, changing the plot in front of your eyes. As a student, I found the story ominous and portentous, as if there was a mystery there I needed to figure out, a mystery that was going to end worse than I could ever imagine. I re-read the story later in his book “Pricksongs and Descants” (and reviewed it here) and now understand that, sure, it was ominous but it was also sheer play, a man who is throwing around words like marbles on pavement, seeing which ones fall in to the realm of the possible and in awe of how they glint and prism in the sunlight. Robert Coover is also a professor at Brown, the school I would earn my MFA from if pure desire were the only qualification for admission. Sigh. No really, I’m not bitter. Just mildly bruised.
With all this glowing praise thus far, you will understand that I really looked forward to reading more of his work and decided recently upon his 1998 novel, “John’s Wife.” Why? It was on the shelf at the library. May not be the best reason but I gotta tell you I am thankful it was there because I was flabbergasted and amazed by this book. From the cover of the book to the last word (which is “Once,” not that that spoils anything), I was hooked. Again, Coover is his fabulist meta self, shifting narrator from paragraph to paragraph throughout a cast of characters who inhabit a nameless Midwestern (I think) town.
Forty one characters to be exact–I just counted. This movement between the 41 causes the plot to shift back and forth in time as well as reveal the past and future in tempting bits and pieces, crumbs of the pie so to speak. At times, the narration passes from person to person like the flu, moving with a touch or an interaction to the next person in contact. Other times, it revolves around a theme. For example, let’s see what everyone in town is dreaming tonight or let’s chronicle how everyone lost their virginity–when, with whom, with each other? Only one person’s name may be in the title (John) and the subject of that title (John’s wife) is never identified as anything else. That’s because despite the title, this is the story of an entire town. The stories of entire lives, successes, mistakes, humanity. The story of how different, similar and connected all of those individual lives are, to the point that maybe they aren’t individual at all. Maybe our own voices are not distinct in the crowd, and we thinkwe can hear ourselves only to stave off madness.
Of course, let me quote the author’s own words, told in the voice of the philosophical town librarian to her pharmacist husband after watching a monster movie:
“We like to think, even when we’re being reasonable, that there are fixed boundaries—to our bodies, our essential being, our homes and families, our towns and nations—it’s how we know or think we know we have a self. But maybe it’s all a mad delusion, maybe there are no boundaries and no selves either, our conscious life just a way of hiding the real truth from us because, simply, it’s too much to live with. We have to stuff it back down in the pit where the creepies live, if we want to function at all, even if functioning, as we call it, is possibly the craziest thing we do. Art, even bad art like Hollywood horror movies, puts us in touch with that truth by breaking down the boundaries for a moment, producing monsters we secretly know to be more real than the good citizens that eventually subdue them.”
I say I was hooked. Now, I don’t want to mislead you with that phrase. It did take me a bit over two weeks to finish “John’s Wife” and that is a really long time in Kate world. Therefore let me warn you that this brilliant, witty narration can also be thick and confusing. The first hundred pages, I had to keep referring back to see who was who in an effort to keep the names straight. And the in-your-head streaming of thoughts made me often pause to catch my breath so I read in short–but satisfying–bursts. The concept, which I am amazed Coover was able to sustain so well for so long, sometimes makes the reader think that they are losing track of the plot, a confusing sensation that makes you doubt your own abilities of comprehension.
But of course, the characters are thrown into that world of doubt, too, of doubting their eyes, their hearts, their own existence. In the beginning, the characters may have reminded me of my grandmother and her sisters and friends, who grew up in a small town in days she paints with the “good ‘ole” brush. But then we see sin, temptation, greed, orgies, homosexuality of both sexes (which no longer remind me of my grandmother, naturally). We see reformed sinners as well as the religious kind in disguise. Oh and it gets better. After that comes the supernatural. Ghosts, metaphysical experiences, medical abnormalities, alternate realities. Fire, giants, gods, art.
I think the reader is supposed to experience that sensation of disorientation. Lose the train of thought that is. Get lost in the coal smoke and see that the scenery rolling by is becoming more surrealistic. Like you are on the track to hell but everyone sees, no one denies it and the rest of humanity does not implode, vanish or in any other way prove that it is not really happening. So it is really happening. Your disbelief is suspended into the atmophere, or even over the rainbow into Oz.
Let me again quote the author in the words of the town newspaperman/hopeful author, who missed an issue of the paper due to a personal meltdown:
He had not, for the first time since he undertook the task, kept the record [published the newspaper], he knew that, but the record he had kept all these years, or thought he’d kept, was now, he found, dissolving on him, as though to teach him what he had always known—that words were not, as he liked to pretend, the stubborn monitors of time, adamant and fixed as number, but were time’s recombinatory toys and about as hard as water—and so to taunt him with the futility of his record-keeping mission… Art emerges, not from the seen, but from the longing for what is not seen.
Yet the reader keeps reading those futile words… and with gusto. Not because the words are facts, permanent and set. But because they are shifting, confusing, false and therefore totally human in a way that truth could never be.
Right? Have I lost ya? Well, can’t say that I blame you if I have. After all, it took me more than two weeks to digest it all and it is well worth the meal. I didn’t read a story. I read all the stories. Every story. I didn’t learn anything or have any revelations. Instead, I learned about the revelations behind the falsity of facts.
I was like Otis, the police cheif, whose…
… desire [was] now was to recapture that visionary moment just before, wherein, as he now recalled, his whole life as Officer Otis the guardian warrior had been revealed as a mockery, a self-delusion: what did his lifelong obsession with order and disorder have to do with this turbulent, radiant, and tender world which knew, at heart, no such distinction? … Yes, he had been ready at last to shed all artifice—to be a man merely of the here and now was to be a man closed out from eternity!—and to embrace, if it could be said to be embracable, the legendary abyss, which seemed to lie just beyond the war undulant flesh.
Two weeks. Yes, two weeks on one book is a long time for me, like watching a nine-hour marathon of Law and Order or The Sopranos (or some other deep show you like, doesn’t matter). You don’t regret it. In fact, you loved it. But it’s time to change the channel now, maybe towards some Gilligan’s Island or a nice game show. I think for my next book I will try out something fluffier, something that tells a nice story that moves from point A to point B and ends at point C. Not that such a linear plot means life, literature or art is so linear or logical or valid. But like the librarian character points out, we all need our little delusions and distractions.
Rating: 5 out of 5 stars - Buy the hardcover
5 out of 5 Star Books, Fiction, Repeated Author |