General
Robert Coover, Inventive Novelist in Iconoclastic Era, Dies at 92
Once called “probably the funniest and most malicious” of the postmodernists, his books reflected a career-long interest in reimagining folk stories, fairy tales and political myths.
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.)
