In 2019, I got on a train to Providence, to meet Bob Coover. He whipped up to the curb outside the station in an early-gen, inexplicably light, Opel car. Such a mode of transportation seemed exactly appropriate for the man who was—though he’d balk at the title—America’s preeminent avant-garde novelist.

The door swung open; I got a “get in.” For several hours, we milled around town and hit upon a story that he thought might resemble a close future, Street Cop.

It was a closer future than we might have known. In Street Cop, a police officer-cum-small time crook rushes through the Capitol building. The building falls; it’s complete pandemonium. Art Spiegelman was illustrating Coover’s story when he turned on the news on January 6, 2021, and saw what Coover had written being played out before him. As Coover recounted to Art: “Yes, there are strange things that happen in my fiction. But strange things happen in the real world, too... When people ask me, I say that I learned my realism from Kafka.”

The majority of writing about Coover will refer to him as a postmodernist. In the time I knew him, he would insist that he was simply writing his own brand of realism, pushing words like “text” and “story” to the limits of their meaning. Remarkably, he was the first to use a living public figure as a character in a novel—Richard Nixon, in the 1977 novel Public Burning—for which he paid the price of more than a decade of legal jeopardy. And yet, he wasn’t afraid to step back into the ring, writing Nixon into his 1987 novella Whatever Happened to Gloomy Gus of the Chicago Bears. Coover’s bibliography is littered with symbols and icons of modern America: presidents, baseball stars, street cops, even Uncle Sam himself, figures who struggle for love and happy endings, only to crash into one another, as the American myth tumbles forward.

While his writing so often concerned America, his commitment was to his international peers as the organizer of the International Writers Center, with which he brought luminaries such as Nuruddin Farah and Can Xue into English. The center also provided a safe haven for persecuted writers in exile.

In the same conversation with Spiegelman, Coover said, “it’s with humor, and mockery, that I’ve often taken aim at our patriotic and cultural myths. That’s the role of the storyteller—to recombine and reinvent them, and tease their untruths—their delusions of freedom, justice, and equality or baser impulses of racism, sexism, and fear. And you need to be open to that—otherwise you progress, but only through repression, which is never healthy.”

Among the reasons Coover was so frequently attached to postmodernism, was his exploration of new technologies. He was one of the first writers to use hypertext, and in the 1980s, with computer scientist Andy van Dam (the co-inventor of hypertext, and the man after whom the character Andy in Toy Story is named), he pioneered “cave writing”, the first 3-D virtual reality space for fiction. Not long after, in a 1992 New York Times Op-Ed, he announced “The End of Books,” or at least as we knew them.

“The impact of new technologies upon literature is both profound and negligible,” he said in a 2004 lecture in Barcelona. “Negligible in the sense that our oldest known narrative of any length, the Gilgamesh Epic, hacked out on clay tablets by the heirs to the inventors of writing itself, is still readable and can still touch us, and the same of course can be said of pre-Biblical, Biblical, and ancient Greek narrative and poetry, and of ancient Chinese literature as well. Indeed there are those who will argue that these great works have never been surpassed, and that all subsequent writing amounts to little more than footnotes to the original classics.

“But it must also be said that changing technologies continually reshape the very nature of the artistic enterprise. The dominant narrative forms of recent times, the novel and the movie, for example, would not have been possible without the technologies that created, not so much the forms themselves, as the new audiences toward whom artists directed their endeavors, some translating the classic modes into the new technologies, others exploring the new technologies for new forms appropriate to them, Miguel de Cervantes being a classic exemplar of the latter.”

Coover was not only a writer but a technologist: though I suspect he would argue that to be a writer is to be a technologist. Driving me back to the station, I asked him “Why do you write?” He got the reference—to a startling 1986 reading he gave, “In answer to the question: why do you write?”—and chuckled. By this point, his answer had become much simpler: to have fun, why else?

—SC, October 2024.