Robert Coover, The Public Burning (New York: The Viking Press, 1977)
It turns out, all these years later, that Coover's one-of-a-kind postmodern phantasmagoria The Public Burning still has the capacity to surprise.
For one thing, the book is perhaps more readable than anticipated. As a teenager—the age when I first began to marshal the list of books I would read over the rest of my life—I taught myself to regard all heavy tomes produced by postmodern luminaries as notoriously "difficult" and extravagantly highbrow. I therefore beheld all the longer works of Pynchon, Gaddis, Coover, Barth and company with so much reverence that I could scarcely make an attempt upon them.
When one is grown and finally getting around to reading Coover's most famous work, however, one discovers that a new attitude is in order. At some point, whether it is in the scene where Richard Nixon (at the time of the book's publication still very much alive, and only a few years out of office) is french-kissing Ethel Rosenberg in the bowels of Sing Sing prison, or it comes a few chapters later, when he is being sodomized by the literal incarnation of Uncle Sam—a materialized embodiment of the American spirit who, in the novel, possesses each U.S. president in turn—one realizes that reverence is far from what this book demands.
A second surprise is that the novel hasn't aged as badly as one might have feared—at least not in all respects. I went into this one thinking that its fundamental attitude to the Rosenberg case, for instance, might not have withstood the test of time. After all, the novel is a satire on anti-Communist paranoia in the 1950s, and it takes an unmistakably sympathetic stance toward Julius and Ethel, the "atomic spies." Yet subsequent revelations from the Soviet archives (which came to light long after Coover's novel was published) have largely confirmed the federal prosecutors' version of events: they were guilty of the espionage of which they were convicted.
This too, however, proves to be an irrelevant consideration in reading Coover's book. After all, the novelist himself seems ambivalent on the question of their guilt. Telling his story largely from the perspective of Richard Nixon as then–Vice President, he excavates all the doubts a thoughtful citizen might have about both the fairness of the trial, but also about the Rosenbergs' strained protestations of total innocence. He—at least to the extent he is channeling himself through Nixon—concludes that they probably did some but not all of what they were accused of; and more importantly, he implies, their guilt does not itself resolve the question of whether their prosecution was still in fact a kind of witch hunt.
Coover's theme is that regardless of guilt, the Rosenberg trial and execution were made to take on a purgative public significance.
In this sense, if in no other, the Rosenbergs were indeed scapegoats. They may not have been innocent before the law. But they were made to bear the full weight of transgressions not their own. After all, the information they passed to the Soviets was unlikely to have made any significant difference in the unfolding of the Cold War, or the development of nuclear technology on the other side of the Iron Curtain. But they had the misfortune to be found out at a time when the United States had just lost prestige, pride, and the feeling of security on the world stage following the news that the Soviets had developed their own atomic weapons.
The Rosenbergs—a mother and father of two young boys—were thus the material ready to hand for a nation suddenly scared and looking for vengeance. The novel depicts how prosecutors attempted to threaten them with death in order to gain leverage; only to be confronted by two people firm-willed enough not to yield to these vile tactics. Chiefly as a result of this, and not of the legal status of their actions, they were horrifically executed by electric chair.
This is the point of Coover's story. And it remains a plausible reading of the whole affair, regardless of the facts about the Rosenbergs' Moscow handlers that have since come to light.
None of which is to say the book never feels dated. There are stretches when, as in Pynchon, the joke wears thin. One begins to suspect this is not as funny as it was meant to be, or than it seemed at the time of publication. But it does, as I say, nearly always give one a reason to be surprised—by its unexpected freshness and uniqueness, by its fervid bricolage of all kinds of 1950s cultural ephemera and Americana—from Clare Boothe Luce to Betty Crocker, by its weirdly endearing portrayal of the awkward and tragically-flawed Nixon, by the author's sudden flashes of tenderness and seriousness and outrage as he surveys the spectacle of a Red Scare that, in real life, may not have involved superheroes and sodomy or public executions in Times Square—but that did in fact result in the legal murder of two young parents.
I hope the novel sticks around and continues to surprise still other readers for generations to come; for this reason, I offer my usual copy-edits and marginal comments:
p. 72 "whose clothes look like they're [sic] been slept in" -- should be "they've"
p. 187 "muttering irritably under by [sic] breath" -- should be "my"
p. 276 "But before I could come up with a good one. [sic] Bob Considine forced the issue[.]"-- sic, replace period with comma
p. 399 "like a bittle [sic] bit of heaven" —unless this is some sort of pun or wordplay in context that's lost on me
p. 409 "And kind of real intimacy, you mean?" —should be "any kind" in context.
p. 419 Note: the character of Uncle Sam in his prophetic mode speaks almost entirely through quotations from famous American writers and orators. Most I had to look up, but his "Do you know that all the great work of the world is done through me" I knew immediately: that's Sandburg, thank you very much!
p. 437 "new flavors flowed forth. [sic] exotic and strange [...]" —replace period with comma
p. 444 "our fingers were engangled [sic]" Unless, again, this is some joke I'm not getting.
p. 474 "and incidentally this is unprecedented in the history of American politics"—a play on a line from the Checkers speech. In the real event, Nixon uttered these words in reference to baring his finances before the American public. On this occasion in the novel, it's apropos of him baring his ass.
p. 480 "the Communists conspiracy" [sic]
p. 496 Note: Uncle Sam again, this time putting a Cold War spin on the line from Emerson's "Brahma": "If the Red slayer thinks he slays..."
p. 522 "the point of greatest danger is not preparing to meet the crisis or fighting the [...] battle—it occurs after the crisis of battle is over." This is a reference to a real line from Nixon. See the full quotation here.
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