The Public Burning

by Robert Coover

A controversial best-seller in 1977, The Public Burning has since emerged as one of the most influential novels of our time. The first major work of contemporary fiction ever to use historical figures as characters, the novel reimagines the three fateful days in 1953 that culminated with the execution of alleged atomic spies Julius and Ethel Rosenberg. Vice-President Richard Nixon - the voraciously ambitious bad boy of the Eisenhower regime - is the dominant narrator in an enormous cast that includes Betty Crocker, Joe McCarthy, the Marx Brothers, Walter Winchell, Uncle Sam, his adversary The Phantom, and Time magazine incarnated as the National Poet Laureate. All of these and thousands more converge in Times Square for the carnivalesque auto-da-fé at which the Rosenbergs are put to death. And not a person present escapes implication in Cold War America's ruthless "public burning."

Genres: Fiction, Historical Fiction, Novels, Literature, American, Politics, 20th Century

544 pages, Paperback

First published January 1, 1977

About the author

Robert Lowell Coover was an American novelist, short story writer, and T. B. Stowell Professor Emeritus in Literary Arts at Brown University. He is generally considered a writer of fabulation and metafiction. He became a proponent of electronic literature and was a founder of the Electronic Literature Organization.

Reviews

[Vit Babenco · Rating 5 out of 5]

Movers and shakers never cease to move and shake…
Be pleased to meet Ike Eisenhower:

His clumsiness, I thought, is part of his disguise, part of his armor, a kind of self-defense mechanism – he seems most sincere just when he makes the least sense.

Now enjoy meeting Dick Nixon:

Let the best man win so long as it’s me… I wanted it to be played with rhetoric and industry, yet down deep I knew that even at its most trivial, politics flirted with murder and mayhem, theft and cannibalism.

An at last, here comes Joe McCarthy:

He parades through like a peacock, sporting all his medals, and jabbing his stubby fingers in outrage at any signs of pink stains on the face of the monument.

I always suspected that the world is ruled by the cabal of clowns – bloody clowns. And it all would be a funny slapstick show however instead of sticks they have knives…

The meek inherited nothing but regrets and failure in this world!

Somehow, the bright future never fails to turn into the dim present.

[BlackOxford · Rating 5 out of 5]

This Is a Job for Uncle Sam!

A very exciting way to write history, at least political history, which is simultaneously personal and public, psychological and strategic, irrationally rational and therefore so dense with meaning it defies conventional narrative. As Richard Nixon says in The Public Burning, “... just as a nation has neither friends nor enemies, only interests, so there are no enduring loyalties in politics except where they are tied up in personal interests.” And personal interests are about as complicated as it gets. They ensure that “Politics is the only game played with real blood.”

In American democratic politics “Issues are everything, even when they’re meaningless.” Trump has his Wall, Nixon had Reds Under Our Beds. Both are symbols of tribal affiliation rather than threats to the Republic. This is what democracy is built upon: emotive symbols. So, indeed, as Nixon knew so longingly, “isn’t that a hell of a thing—that the fate of a great country can depend on camera angles?” He eventually got his angles right when he shifted his focus from Commies to Black people as the main threat to the Nation. Trump has simply enlarged this anti-constituency by including Latinos and Muslims. He like Nixon is clearly ignorant; but in one sense “they have learned too much, have built up ways of looking at the world that block off natural human instincts.”

The Public Burning is a permanent reminder, a literary monument, to just how strange the political culture of the United States is. While its focus is the execution of Julius and Ethel Rosenberg in 1953 for the crime of treason, its subject is the pervasive and apparently permanent disfunction of American democracy. It is a chronicle only marginally of a likely injustice. More importantly it is an analysis of how America really works, which is largely on the basis of personalities, and the competition among these personalities in all aspects of American life. The Prologue makes it clear that there is a psychotic thread connecting George Washington to Donald Trump. This thread is a sentiment of persistent, radical resentment.

This resentment seems to be centred on the fact that there exists any government at all. Government is an inimical force in America because it is so political. And it is so political because it is so rightly mistrusted. Nixon again: “Here is a political truth: Deviousness wins votes. Dishonesty is often the best policy.” The Right wants the abolition of government; the Left its transformation into something else. This is the American Way. One’s opponents, therefore, are not only to be beaten but to be crushed - merely because they want to govern at all. Schadenfreude is the underlying emotion. No matter who loses, America wins. “Enlightenment or no, we still had our roots in the Dark Ages,” muses the President manqué.

There is a widespread calumny that America has the best politicians money can buy. Trump is proof that this is patent nonsense. There are many better politicians for sale in the USA than he. And it has probably always been so. Coover‘s take on Eisenhower, for example, shows how remarkably similar at least Republican Presidents have been in terms of brain power: “Uncle Sam [Eisenhower, as his contemporary incarnation] needed vacuity for an easy passage [to the presidency]... and as for reading, more than a page and he went blind.” Eisenhower’s (public) Puritanism is the flip-side of Trump’s (private) Hedonism on the political coin. It is not difficult to replace ‘Uncle Sam’ with Ford, Reagan, ‘W’ Bush, or Trump, not to mention Harding, Hoover, or Taft (well, maybe not him) for the passage to read as sensibly. The idea that the election of Trump and his obvious appeal to the American people is an aberration, a hiccup that will be corrected, is clearly a hopeful urban myth with no factual basis whatsoever.

Put another way: Donald Trump is neither an exception nor an error. He is, it is true, tasteless, openly mendacious, crude, vengeful, and capricious. But these are incidental personality traits. His fundamental character is a precise reflection of America: instinctively violent when resisted; suspicious of everything, especially its own people; self-deluding about its motivations; blasphemously self-assured about its role in the world; and willing to sacrifice itself for an ideology it is in fact inadequately educated to understand. The ‘checks and balances’ of the Constitution may be far less important to controlling American power than the competitive free for all on which the system is premised. So, for example, despite his rather more civilised behaviour than Trump, “Eisenhower’s relationship with Congressional Republicans was so fragile, we couldn’t afford to antagonize them in any way” It’s that old pioneer spirit that makes everyone so skittish, especially around friends.

America has always been this way. If, as the Evangelicals believe, Trump is an instrument of the divine despite his flaws, it can only be to hold a mirror up to the country, to reveal what they actually are. This is the real value of his tweets which have revealed fully for the first time the banality of the society he leads as well as that of the leader. Granted, the likelihood of such a revelatory recognition is low. But that’s where books like The Public Burning become important. Among other things, it documents the historical continuity of popular insanity in American democracy and its manipulation by government and business.

Coover re-casts America’s Uncle Sam, that old Yankee Peddler, the eternal Spirit of One Nation Under God, as Slick Sam, the fast-talking huckster who sells nationalistic snake oil to a willing populace through the likes of Hearst and Luce and Fox. I think that’s just about right. Says Ike: “A lousy situation, but dese, as the man says, are de conditions dat prevail!”

Postscript: An academic sociological perspective ‘confirming’ Coover’s fiction as an interpretation of American politics can be found here: https://www.goodreads.com/review/show...

[Ian "Marvin" Graye · Rating 4 out of 5]

A Tale of Two Atrocities

"The Public Burning” is a fast and loose fictionalization of the three days leading up to the execution of Julius and Ethel Rosenberg on the evening of Friday, June 19, 1953.

They were convicted of a charge of conspiracy to commit espionage, relating to passing information about the atomic bomb to the Soviet Union.

Neither directly stole the information, nor passed it on to a Soviet agent. If anything, they both had quite insignificant roles, compared to those who gave evidence for the People and received prison sentences.

The government believed that death sentences imposed on a married couple with young children would force them to confess and to identify other members of an allegedly more extensive atomic spy ring.

Apart from knowing what her husband might have done, Ethel's only role was to have typed some notes of a meeting that was supposed to have taken place in their kitchen. It has subsequently been revealed that the evidence that she had done this was fabricated by two of the other defendants (her brother and sister-in-law, David and Ruth Greenglass, who equally had young children, but didn't want to be executed).



The Rosenbergs' sons, Robert, 6, and Michael, 10, read about their parents' fate.


A Torrent of Omniscience

The novel consists of two alternating and intertwining threads: in the even chapters, Coover uses a third person omniscient narrator, while the odd chapters are ostensibly narrated by Vice-President Richard Nixon.

The omniscient narrative reads like press clippings, banner headlines and news tickers. There are frequent lists of attendees at public and private events. The novel describes itself as a rash of evil doings and idle banter, but it's more like a torrent.

It’s sometimes difficult to tell whether Coover has written these chapters or appropriated them from contemporary sources.

If the former, they’re highly authentic. If the latter, they contribute to the post-modern composite nature of the novel.

Richard Nixon and His Amazing Performing Zeal

The Nixon chapters are written in a confessional form, like memoirs or journal entries. Given that Coover wrote the novel in the lead up to Nixon’s impeachment and resignation, they are surprisingly sympathetic to the politician. He is portrayed as unwanted, unpopular, the iron butt of jokes, an underdog, an outsider, a friendless loner, who was never accepted by the educational, legal and political establishment.

His grandmother has drummed into him the four selves: self-respect, self-regulation, self-restraint, self-attainment. Nevertheless, he has become a political animal whose greatest quality is his capacity for hard work: "zeal is my charisma.”

Empathy for the Devil

In the lead-up to the execution, Nixon reads and regurgitates all of the material about the Rosenbergs that he can get his hands on, in case he needs to give advice to Cabinet. In the course of his reading:

"I realised we had a lot in common.”

They were all born into "the Generation of the Great Depression”. The Rosenbergs advocate "peace, freedom and decency”, later it’s "freedom, culture and human decency”. They want to live "decent, constructive lives.” Compared with Nixon, though, they hang out with "friends who live pretty unconventional lives.”

Nixon says of Julius:

"He's a Marxist and has nothing but contempt for the bourgeois capitalist press, yet paradoxically he is also somehow an Americanist and a believer in Science and Freedom and History and Reason.”

While Nixon is patriotic, he understands the Rosenbergs’ loyalty to a cause, even if it might have resulted in them betraying their own country. The empathy that Nixon feels for the Rosenbergs gives added insight into not only the accused, but Nixon himself.

Against Singular Positions

Mother Luce of Time magazine says, "Business is, esentially, our civilisation.”

Nixon the Fighting Quaker doesn’t see things so simply. He can’t quite abandon the modesty and lack of pretension of his religion and upbringing. Somehow he maintains a foot in both camps:

"We were more like mirror images of each other, familiar opposites. Left-right, believer-nonbeliever, city-country, accused-accuser, maker-unmaker...He moved to the fringe as I moved to the centre…

"It all served to confirm an old belief of mine: that all men contain all views, right and left, theistic and atheistic, legalistic and anarchical, monadic and pluralistic; and only an artificial - call it political - commitment to consistency makes them hold steadfast to singular positions.”





It’s My Circus, and I’ll Play If I Want To

Politics remains the stage upon which this pantomime is played.

On the one hand, politics has become a battle between equal and opposite forces (apart from the temporary advantage possession of the Bomb had given America). The superpowers have become superheroes. Uncle Sam wrestles the Phantom. The Sons of Light engage the Sons of Darkness. At stake is the Crime of the Century. The perpetrators must be captured and punished.

On the other hand, politics has become "a little morality play for our generation”, a form of vaudeville, an entertainment, a skit full of slapstick, a farce, a circus, a burlesque, a grotesque spectacle, a chamber of horrors, a scandal:

"This thing is so foolish as to be fantastic.”

For Uncle Sam, it might be a circus, but "it’s my circus”. Still, the participants of whatever complexion are "a bunch of clowns”. They share a Rabelaisian spirit of perversity and are hungry for the sensationalism that Coover delivers them in spades.

Subversive, Cooversive

As realistically as the novel commences, Coover signals his mischievous intent almost immediately.

In the first paragraph, he mentions that the Supreme Court determined "to burn them in New York City’s Times Square on the night of their fourteenth wedding anniversary, Thursday, June 18, 1953,” (as it turned out, additional appeals in the Supreme Court delayed the execution until the following night) hence the "public burning” of the novel’s title.

The execution took place by electric chair in Sing Sing Prison. Colloquially, the Rosenbergs were burned, but not publicly.

Coover proceeds to blur the distinction between fiction and journalism, documentary and satire. Like his portrayal of the executions themselves, the novel is ”theatrical, political, whimsical.”

The closest literary analogy is the New Journalism written by the likes of Norman Mailer, Truman Capote, Tom Wolfe and Hunter S. Thompson. However, Coover’s novel is actually almost a mirror image of New Journalism. It is fiction that masquerades as journalism, whereas New Journalism was journalism masquerading as fiction.

The Levity of the Carnival

The journalistic, memoirist feel of the novel helps to achieve a degree of levity that offsets and balances the comic overtones.

Unlike Rabelais and Swift, the more serious commentary is actually based on very real events and responses to them.

If you removed the carnivalesque description, what remains would be a pretty good historical primer with respect to this period of American history.

A Plot Well-Executed

The novel is superbly paced as it works towards the executions and the aftermath in Times Square. A clock counts down, while the news tickers rotate. It’s all happening, and we’re positioned in the middle of it.

The riff raff, the mob in the Square wants a public burning, and Uncle Sam is determined to deliver them what they want. A la ”The Crucible”:

"Any man who is dominated by demonic spirits to the extent that he gives voice to apostasy is to be subject to the judgment upon sorcerers and wizards.”

Coover’s tale documents and distils all the sorcery and wizardry of a latter day origin myth with respect to American democracy.

"I Am a Scamp”

Immediately before the executions, Nixon seeks a private audience with Ethel, in order to give her one last chance to confess, effectively by naming the names of others.

He knows that there is a weakness in the People’s case, and while it remains, History might judge Uncle Sam adversely.

This is where satire approaches questionable taste. There is a lengthy, well-written scene of attempted seduction between the two protagonists. Some describe it as pornography, others as misogynistic (for an example, see Adrienne Rich’s poem at the link below).

Nixon or Coover (or is it both?) envisages Ethel saying to Nixon:

"I envy you your power...your majesty. You are a great man! I have faith in you, Richard! You will unite the nation and bring peace to mankind..."

It’s not clear how seriously we’re supposed to take this passage, and who we are supposed to believe.

Does it make light of the real Ethel’s marriage, resolve and dignity? Is it a logical extension of Nixon’s perverse persona? Does it encapsulate his empathy? Or detract from it? Does it all occur in Nixon’s imagination?

Does Uncle Sam’s political power inevitably have an erotic element? Does Coover foreshadow a President who ”did not have sexual relations with that woman”?

Are we entitled or obliged to differentiate Coover from his characters? What was Coover's motive? Is it relevant or legitimate to pursue this line of inquiry?

In this way, the novel asks and anticipates many of the questions raised by ”American Psycho”.

The Eroticism of Politics (or The Politics of Eroticism?)

Having read the novel twice, I’m still prepared to err on the side of Coover.

If at the time that this novel was first published in 1977 there was any doubt that eroticism was at the heart of the American Psyche and its politics, it has since been expunged.

Whatever its flaws, this is one of the great works of American literature. Coover deserves a place beside other profound, profane and prescient novelists like Pynchon and DeLillo.




Pour Michael et Robby Rosenberg: Picasso



ADDED EXTRAS:

Judge Irving Kaufman's Reasons for Imposing the Death Penalty

"I consider your crime worse than murder...

"I believe your conduct in putting into the hands of the Russians the A-Bomb years before our best scientists predicted Russia would perfect the bomb has already caused, in my opinion, the Communist aggression in Korea, with the resultant casualties exceeding 50,000 and who knows but that millions more of innocent people may pay the price of your treason.

"Indeed, by your betrayal you undoubtedly have altered the course of history to the disadvantage of our country. No one can say that we do not live in a constant state of tension. We have evidence of your treachery all around us every day for the civilian defense activities throughout the nation are aimed at preparing us for an atom bomb attack."


Case Overview
Robert Meeropol (born Robert Rosenberg) 2011

"Julius Rosenberg engaged in non-atomic espionage during the 1940's [up until January, 1945, when he was fired from the Army Corp of Engineers].

"The Greenglasses delivered atomic information of relatively little value to the Soviet Union without the Rosenbergs’ direct assistance.

"Neither Julius nor Ethel Rosenberg was a member of an atomic spy ring that stole the secret of the Atomic Bomb.

"The United States government knew all along that Ethel Rosenberg was not an espionage agent, and that Julius was not an atomic spy, but executed them both anyway."

http://www.rfc.org/caseoverview


Nikita S. Khrushchev's Memoirs

"Let my words serve as an expression of gratitude to those who sacrificed their lives to a great cause of the Soviet state at a time when the U.S. was using its advantage over our state to blackmail our state and undermine its proletarian cause."


If We Die
by Ethel Rosenberg
Ossining. N.Y., Jan. 24, 1953

You shall know, my sons, shall know
why we leave the song unsung,
the book unread, the work undone
to rest beneath the sod.

Mourn no more, my sons, no more
why the lies and smears were framed,
the tears we shed, the hurt we bore
to all shall be proclaimed.

Earth shall smile, my sons, shall smile
and green above our resting place,
the killing end, the world rejoice
in brotherhood and peace.

Work and build, my sons, and build
a monument to love and joy,
to human worth, to faith we kept
for you, my sons, for you.


Adrienne Rich - "For Ethel Rosenberg"

The full poem:

http://voetica.com/voetica.php?collec...

An extract:

"After her death
she becomes a natural prey for pornographers
her death itself a scene
her body sizzling half-strapped whipped like a sail
She becomes the extremest victim
described nonetheless as rigid of will"


It's quite likely that Robert Coover is one of the "pornographers" referred to in these lines, some of which are quoted from the novel.


Adrienne Rich - "For Ethel Rosenberg" [A reading of the second half of her poem]

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YbfZa...


Ethel's Resolve

The trial was a fraud,
The sentences vindictive,
To make us confess.


Auto-da-Fé

If the killing ends
Because we died, boys,
Build a monument
To peace, love and joy.


Rosenberg Fund for Children

The Rosenberg Fund for Children is a non-profit, public foundation that makes grants to aid children in the U.S. whose parents are targeted, progressive activists. It also assists youth who themselves have been targeted as a result of their progressive activities. Donations to the RFC are tax-deductible to the full extent of the law.

http://www.rfc.org/




Vemork Hydroelectric Plant, Rjukan, Norway


Heavy Water
[A Fictional Speculation on the Nature of Treachery]

Dearest Romy

I don’t know whether you’ll ever receive this letter, but I’ll write it anyway, if only so Lotte can read it when she’s old enough.

The Kommandant said not to waste too much time on it, as if he knew it would be destroyed when it left my hands.

He grinned when he said that, though, and he’s been kind to me in the past, so you never know.

It broke my heart when you left Germany with your parents. At 18, I thought you’d be old enough to stay and ultimately marry me. For your father, it was more important that you remain alive than that you get married to an up and coming German physicist.

I thought your family would inevitably end up somewhere neutral and faraway like the United States.

Imagine my surprise when we ran into each other in a bar in Oslo. We both cried, as if two parts of the one being had been lost and then reunited by chance. I didn’t want to let go of your hand.

Of course, I was only in Norway, because Germany had invaded it. Neutrality vanished overnight, and with it the safety of your family.

If your father had been able to arrange passage earlier, I might never have seen you again. However, it didn’t prove so easy this time.

I hadn’t wanted to go to Norway, but my knowledge of heavy water was deemed vital to the project at Norsk Hydro. If I performed well there, my old Professor felt I would eventually become a valued part of the Uranverein back in Germany. It was only supposed to be a 12 month project. Deutsche Physik was a difficult club to join, but once you were in, it was hard to get out.

Of course, in Munich, it had helped that you were perceived as an olive Aryan, at worst a woman of French or perhaps even Hungarian origin. Nobody suspected you of being a Jew, at least before you left Germany.

Initially, your appearance wasn’t even commented on in Norway. Nobody thought twice about giving you a job in the communications office at the Lab. Who was I to say? It wasn’t my decision. My greatest concern was your safety, not its secrecy. As far as I was concerned, you were putting your head in the lion’s mouth, but it was your decision.

You have to admit that I personally took secrecy seriously. I never discussed a single thing about my work with you. Not even in bed. No pillow talk. Not a word. That’s how conscientiously I regarded my own duties. I had my eyes on the Uranverein, after all, even if you couldn’t return to Germany with me.

I suppose I always knew we would have to part company eventually. I just hadn’t thought that there would be three of us by the time we did. Lotte was such a delightful surprise, even if I only got to spend three months with her.

It embarrasses me a little to think that I had no idea what you were up to or that you were about to leave, until it was a fait accompli.

I was even naïve enough to report you as missing to your superior. I suppose, in that way, I brought about my own demise.

Nobody suspected me of helping you take so many of our research records. Initially, it was highly likely that I would be spared and permitted to continue my work. Only, when Himmler found out about us, he described me as a “white Jew”, and I realised that was the end for me. Nobody would stand up to Himmler. Not even in Berlin, let alone Norway!

I’ve been told that your family has been traced to America. It’s assumed that what you took has been passed onto some project there. Even though we’re not at war with the United States, they didn’t want them to get our research. If they’re trying to build a bomb, it will advance them by two or three years. Who knows, they might become our enemy if they think they could beat us.

What hurts is that, if I had known what you were up to, I would have to have stopped you. I would have to have reported you, the mother of my daughter, to our superiors, even if it meant you would have been punished.

I don’t believe in this Third Reich nonsense any more than you or your father. However, they are the current Government of our country, and I must respect their laws, even if I would vote them out, given the chance. Treason is something you commit against your country, not just the current Government, and I could never bring myself to betray my country, its people, no matter how much I disagree with whoever controls the State.

So it is that I accept my fate. There can be no compromise with a traitor, even if I am once removed from one. They say that, if they didn’t execute me, there would be no deterrent to people like you. I suppose it makes sense in a Deutsche Physik kind of way.

They plan to shoot me at dawn tomorrow. I don’t plan to scream or cry or avert my eyes. I’ll hold my head high. I’ve done nothing wrong. I hope that I bring no shame to Lotte and that one day she will be proud of me. God knows that, despite everything that has happened, I love her and her mother.

Karl Schumacher
Rjukan, Norway
September 2, 1941

[Jacob · Rating 5 out of 5]

February 2013

Book I Bought In 2007 And Hadn't Read Yet (As Of January 2013) #1: The Public Burning by Robert Coover

"Those who have cast their lot with me shall come to dominion! Those who have cast it with the Phantom shall get their ass stacked!"
-Uncle Sam

Mine eyes have seen the glory!

1953, June 17th, Wednesday: Eisenhower is Superchief, Richard Nixon his right-hand man, Time magazine the Poet Laureate. J. Edgar Hoover, Joe McCarthy, and Billy Graham, great Americans all, have worked tirelessly to root out Communism and godlessness here at home. But across the world the Korean War rages on, Communism spreads unchecked, the Phantom works his dark magic, and Uncle Sam, that star-spangled Superhero sprung fully-formed from the forehead of Liberty to bring freedom to the world and a boot to its behind, has run himself ragged trying to keep up. And in New York, Julius and Ethel Rosenberg, traitors, atomic spies, agents of the Phantom, "thieves of light," are scheduled to be executed--"burned by light" in the electric chair--before the eyes of the entire nation in Times Square on their fourteenth wedding anniversary, Thursday the 18th.

The stage is set, the crowds have gathered, the switch just itches to be thrown, but hark! With mere hours to go, with all appeals exhausted and the Supreme Court gone fishin', that dirty traitor William O. Douglas slithers back to the holy chambers...and grants a stay of execution! The Rosenbergs are saved--and the country doomed! Friends, this is a job for Uncle Sam! And Dick Nixon, of course. Old Iron Butt has enough on his hands corrallin' Congress, but duty (and America!) calls. Can Gloomy Gus save the day? Will the Supreme Court relent? Will the Rosenbergs at last be executed? Can Uncle Sam root out the soldiers of the Phantom? And will Richard Nixon ever get his pants back on?

I do mean that last bit. 'Cuz while this may be a glorious book, awesome in the almighty sense, a powerful rip-roaring yarn, it has a wee tendency to be mighty goddamn frustrating. Coover has a way of drawing out a scene, which ordinarily ain't so bad--just read that prologue and weep, ye sinners--but when Uncle Sam gets to sermonizin', or Tricky Dick Nixon goes golfing or gets caught with his pants down (twice!), time itself starts looking at its watch. (And if Nixon's pants were to fall down while golfing, hell, the goddamn universe might have to call it quits.) And those last hundred pages before the Rosenbergs get frizzled seem almost endless, as the country gathers in Times Square, the Supreme Court goes wallowing in elephant shit, and Iron Butt does his damnedest save the day--but oh, dear friends, all those sins can be forgiven, yessir, because this is one helluva book. When Coover drags it out, hold on to every word--'cuz when he's on fire, hell, ol' Julie and Ethel aren't the only one's who'll burn.

Or maybe that's just me. I was feelin' demoralized and lookin' for something to pick me up last month after failing, in quick succession, to read DFW and M. Proust. Here comes Infinite Jest--and it's steeeee-RIKE one! Swing and a miss! The pitcher winds up and throws out Swann's Way--steeeee-RIKE two! Ol' Jacob's not doin' too well and he doesn't have any balls, could this be the end of the season for him already? Should he try to get hit and walk? Does he even know anything about baseball? Too late--the pitcher's just thrown The Public Burning--and he hits it! He knocks it out of the park! Yahtzee! Goal! TOUCHDOOOWWWWNNN!

Or whatever. You get what I'm saying.

So this book came at the right time, I'd say--and thank Sam for that. But some books are like that. Most books you can read whenever, but others come at a right time: I needed a Gaiman my Junior year of high school, and Neil's Sandman series was the right one for me; China Miéville knocked my socks off a year later and freed me from the same-ol' bloated fantasy novels I'd been mired in for years; in 2006, as I was half-assing my way through a creative writing course at UW-Baraboo, John Irving showed me what real writing looked like in The World According to Garp; and just last year I lost my socks again to Moby-Dick, a great white whale still pure and uncorrupted by any English teacher's soiled touch.

[And then there are the books at come at the wrong time, too early (I was not ready for War and Peace, and probably the same could be said for David Foster Wallace and Proust) or just too late (I think I missed the window for Catcher in the Rye and Pride and Prejudice, and if I had access to a time machine I would go back to Junior year, snatch those Sandman graphic novels out of young-me's grubby paws, and make him read Of Human Bondage instead: "Look, you stupid little shit, another artist type who loves a girl who loves a German! Read it and grow the fuck up!"), but those are stories for other times, 'cuz I've digressed too long, sorry.]

And then there's this magnificent bastard. Ok, so Coover didn't move me or change my life like Irving or Miéville or (what was I thinking?) Gaiman, but it was still a much-needed pick-me-up after getting clobbered by IJ and ISOLT. Could I have read it another time? Sure, maybe--but maybe not. Because I bought The Public Burning almost seven years ago, in 2007, age twenty (some of you just winced), because it sounded interesting...but if I had tried to read it then, in 2007, age twenty (rub it in, why dontcha), I would've been stomped on harder than I was last month by those other chunky books. This was not something I would--or could, probably--have read back then. Irving and Miéville and some others aside, I wasn't much of a reader. Hell, I only started keeping a reading log that year, and looking back (with a shudder), I don't see much worth boasting about. Irving and Miéville show up, yeah, as well as one J. G. Ballard, The Death of Ivan Ilyich, and Bull & Brust's unappreciated Freedom & Necessity, but aside from those I can't really say I read many good books in 2007...

...but I bought some good ones. I was just getting hooked on bookstores then, and I picked up some interesting stuff. Some Homer, some Ovid, plenty of mythology and philosophy and history, Laurence Sterne and Heinrich Böll, Cervantes, Robert Tressell, and others, including this. I bought a bunch of good books...but I haven't actually read them yet. There's a full list right here. Coover's is the first one I can check off. The others I need to get to, along with the 2006 list, over the next year or two. It seems like a fun little project, dontcha think?

The only question is, WHAT'S NEXT?

[MJ Nicholls · Rating 4 out of 5]

A full-toothed pell-mell assault on the American political class rendered in scimitar-sharp prose, rammed into the intestines of the Establishment with merciless force. Split between a rumbustious third-person satirical voice, making full use of Coover’s insane linguistic skill in the phonetic bile of Uncle Sam—a monstrous American Devil pulling the puppet strings—and a section narrated by Dick Nixon (who has his intestines removed and served up on a plate of steaming poop four times per para), The Public Burning re-imagines the execution of Ethel and Julius Rosenberg in the form of a live-TV rabble shambles. A work of obsession and near-madness ensues as Coover tightens his fists around America’s throat: the sort of kind act of public strangulation so needed in these mephitic times. Four stars for the usual Cooverian excesses that make the novel extraordinarily overlong for no reason.

[Glenn Russell]

What if Robert Coover wrote a sequel to The Public Burning set in 2025 where Donald Trump takes decisive action following his election as the next US President? The title might be The New Public Burning. Robert Coover could do it, after all, he's still kicking at age 91 and he wrote The Brunist Day of Wrath in his 70s as a sequel to his The Origin of the Brunists.

The Public Burning published in 1976 and became a bestseller, a novel where the year is 1953 and Julius and Ethel Rosenberg are to be executed on the night of their fourteenth wedding anniversary in two electric chairs mounted on a stage in Times Square, New York City. Everybody who is anybody plays their part in this national extravaganza, including J. Edgar Hoover, Cecil B. De Mille, Walt Disney, Ed Sullivan, Betty Crocker, and Uncle Sam cast as Sam Slick, wily Yankee Peddler.

Here's what I picture in The New Public Burning: the location is Ben Hill Griffin Stadium, the football stadium at University of Florida, seating capacity 90,000. There's a stage set up on the 50 yard line with four electric chairs. Similar to Julius and Ethel Rosenberg, the crime is treason. The four Neo-Maoists to be publicly fried are Joe & Jill Biden alongside Barack & Michelle Obama. As befitting this momentous occasion, Ron DeSantis, Governor of Florida, will serve as master of ceremonies.

So, in the spirit of Robert Coover over-the-top satire, who else is on the scene? What other entertainment is in the offing? All contributions appreciated. Thanks in advance.

Note: For those interested in this Coover masterpiece, please take a look at the comprehensive and incisive reviews posted by Ian, BlackOxford, Matt, Vit and Jacob. Also, this excellent essay: https://www.thedailybeast.com/robert-...

[Jonfaith · Rating 5 out of 5]

I read this as part of a Thomas Pynchon group on yahoo in the late 90s. Apparently I was the only one in the group who braved this wicked ride. I recall calling my grandmother and verifying historical details, particularly about Julius and Ethel Rosenberg . This was such a wild endeavor, one devoured at a very open point in my life. I am far from certain how I would receive this now, some twenty years later.

[Matt · Rating 4 out of 5]

Furious, scatological, enflamed, visionary, razor sharp, scabrous, detailed, lengthy, outraged, overindulgent, pioneering, vicious, vivacious, cynical, black humored, radical, cartoonish, incandescent, haunting

I can see why this book was banned but that's only for the reasons that testify to its power and vision.

This is a cultural link to South Park, The Simpsons, etc. Over the top satire that is just too dead-on to be neglected.

The problem is, its tragicomic vision of a charismatically rapacious America is right on the money. We're talking about RICHARD NIXON here, the man and the myth and how it intersects with the Uncle Sam mythology and our patriotic gore. Coover doesn't mince words (occasionally he over uses them) but he knows EXACTLY what he is putting the scalpel blade to and why, which is terrying for a satirist and mesmerizing for a reader.

Bawdy, rancid, brilliant.

I mean, c'mon, Richard Nixon falls in love with Elanor Roosevelt. "Uncle Sam" is a bigoted, cheery, flamboyant, cartoonish caricature of the american spirit who taunts, mentors, and baits the ruthless and somewhat naieve Nixon to pushing forward the Rosenberg's death in an auto da fe.

Freakish.

Yet, the portrait of Nixon we get here is actually pretty humanizing. He comes across as a sort of lovable lug who is essentially fairly decent and actually rather bewildered by the goings-on around him.

This is powerful stuff for people who like their political satires raw and biting.

Here's an article that says what I'm trying to say even better: http://www.thedailybeast.com/articles...

[Simon Robs · Rating 5 out of 5]

I'd put this book right on par with "Gravity's Rainbow" what with all the pyrotechnics of prose, story twisting girth; a cornucopia altered vision of a slice of U S political history early cold war 50's. It's Tricky Dick like you've never seen him before, a sweet side wha?!! that mingles with other allegorical/political iconery in a dance with death for the atomic two of Julius and Ethel Rosenberg and a host of other real and imagined characters. There's mobs and riots and conspiracies in timeless today fashion, there's a whopee sendoff zinger wtf ending that leaves a reader guessing but the axe ground.

[Jonathan · Rating 4 out of 5]

This is an extraordinary novel, and contains some of the most sustained, inventive, furious satire I have ever read. So why only 4 stars? Well, while there are sections that would fully deserve the full-fathom-five, it was just too much rage to be sustained over a 500 page, tiny-type, novel. Writing in fury is hard, it has a tendency to take over the prose, and it can become a little baggy and unfocused as a result. Some judicious editing might have made this work better for me, though I cannot think of a single section I would want to remove.

[Ian Scuffling · Rating 5 out of 5]

It is with some consternatin that I do believe the Holy Ghost Himself, one Mr. Sam Slick, Uncle Sammy, plug-hatted prometheus is the butt-kickin’, freedom taring ethos of these here YOU-nited States, a tulpa of our ancestors’ devisin’ that we keep churrnin’ up with our idealisms and religionisms and tribality, and that in so en-body-ing that old SPIRIT of America as a homunculus, Mr. Coover here, the confabulator-in-chief of this so-called The Pubic Burning—erm, pubLIC!—has recast the electric glow of our collective his-story! Reckon to re-consile that manipYOUlatif basterd as your fore-pappy, a deity clad in the red white and ba-lue—stars and bars and Ford motorcars—the old pap an interminable windsack full of a freedom-spewing fervor that ain’t listening when you tell’em not to be mixin the bourbon with the wine, and still have to recumpensate the en-TIRE globe for all that liberatin’ vomit steaming up in a froth—accidental or on purrpuss. Whether it be to quenchin’ and chokin’ the flames of commyounauseum er those newfangled sueeside bommers in today’s parlants, yer darn-tootin it’s the same ol’ enemy o’ Ol’ Glory herself, the god fersakin Phantom. It is, without doubt or lack of dooty, that Sam Slick, the ringmastermind, the king corporal, must rise from the vomit to kick The Phantom in his butt and call him macaroonie, and maybe do a few other things to it too. If yer catch the innuitdo. Our Cuntry sure has wrought forth fire and fury, brimstone and brine, bare-assed and kicked ass with a take all prisners approach that entrenches the American Dreamcicle as the end-all-be-all rejoinder against the kitty-caterwallin’ of the uprisin’s uprisin ‘round this here bloo orb orbiting the heel-ee-ohs, but really orbiting ‘round the stars claddin’ Uncle Sam’s taint.

Coover’s reenactin’ of the tale of the Rosenbergs, those old, dirty Atom Spies, the filthy peddlars of America’s secretions to The Phantom’s fattest friend, encandesces the pallor and paltry pittance of hoo-manity that drips from the YOU-ESS guv’mint like thick tar from a tree branch—no room in the belly for any of the so-called reason and justice and empathy when there’s as bigger point to be singed into the pubic—erm, pubLIC!—mind, rilin’em up against the enemies of our freedum and our idealism. This re-imaginin’ by 5-star palavator general Coover is a rough-and-tumble, fun-as-hail romp thru the imagined-yet-unproven-to-exist conshints of Tricky Ding-Dong-Ditch-Dick Nixun, casting him as a symapath, a chess piece on the checkerboard of uh-vuncular Sam, a piece of meat doin’ the biddin’s demanded by the fight agenst The Phantom. A fight that continyous engorgin’ with toomescents, penetratin new tear-itories and lavatories but dressed up in a pretty new dress to keep the pubic—erm, the pubLIC!—all fired up in the name of the stars and bars, flappin’ in the free-est wind that blows liberty’n’justice thru the lands, like the flatulence from Sammy Slick’s ass.

Read it.

[Jim · Rating 5 out of 5]

This is my first Robert Coover book and I enjoyed it from cover to cover. The story covers the three days leading up to the execution of "atomic spies" Julius and Ethel Rosenberg. Coover alternates chapters between a fictional Richard Nixon and a fictional manifestation of Uncle Sam.

The Nixon chapters are told from Tricky Dick's perspective as he struggles with the daily challenges of his job as Ike's not-very-well-respected Vice President, his deteriorating home life, and his sweaty wrestling bouts with his own black demons. Throughout, I couldn't help but think about this passage from David Foster Wallace's Kenyon College commencement speech, This is Water, where he discusses the dangers and necessities of worship in adult life:

Worship power, you will end up feeling weak and afraid, and you will need ever more power over others to numb you to your own fear.

Oh how this character could have benefited from DFW's warning!

The Uncle Sam chapters are much more free-form, chaotic, jingoistic, and nightmarish. Clichés, lies, scandals, and celebrities fill these chapters until you feel like you may have entered Danté's Inferno. Betty Crocker, JEdgar Hoover, Roy Cohn, Senators, Congressmen, crooners, stars, and scoundrels each make their appearance as the clock ticks down to the execution hour.

And what an execution it is! Organized by Cecil B. DeMille, side shows by Walt Disney, performances by the Mormon Tabernacle Choir, endless propaganda from Uncle Sam and his minions, all staged in New York's Times Square with every drop of national glitz you can imagine draped all over the scene. And thankfully, Coover is not afraid to include accurate descriptions of the Rosenberg's as they sizzle on stage for the blood-lusty audience of millions.

If you're old enough to remember Nixon and company, you're gonna love this book!

[Max · Rating 3 out of 5]

For those with an interest in the Rosenberg trials, Richard Nixon, McCarthyism, and the entire 1953 milieu, The Public Burning provides a wild and entertaining view of what might otherwise be a dry subject. Coover’s fictional Nixon is fascinating with Nixon’s reflections on himself as the pragmatic political workman misunderstood by an aloof Eisenhower who both uses and looks askance at him.

Some knowledge of this period is required to get the most from the book. Every celebrity and well-known figure of the times takes part. I was frequently researching names and events.

Most interesting to me is to compare the paranoia and stridency of 1953 to the present. From seeing a communist under every bed, we now look for militant Muslims. While the object of our fear has changed, the fear itself remains generations later. Coover creates an Uncle Sam character to represent America’s unbridled love of self, what we would call today American Exceptionalism, a view that unchecked led us to a bad place in 1953 as it can today.

[Mientras Leo · Rating 5 out of 5]

Cada vez lo tengo más claro. Hay que leer a Coover
Opinión completa
http://entremontonesdelibros.blogspot...

[Nate · Rating 5 out of 5]

And now I have a video review: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RB2MX...


Older Text Review:
Richard Nixon isn’t as bad as you think he is, pleads his Presidential Library’s Twitter account. Firing an FBI director is not Nixonian. Welcome to Trumpland, where one of the worst Presidents in history doesn’t want to be associated with the chaos that sits in the chair. For those like me, who follow the news closer than ever these days, reality feels like a heavy-handed morality lesson in an overly-caricatured cartoon. There are even Twitter accounts dedicated to calling out the bad scriptwriting that the Trump White House has handed us.

Read the whole review at:
https://anastamos.chapman.edu/index.p...

[Nathan "N.R." Gaddis]

This Review is on strike.

Something someday will be added to this Review Box. Meanwhile it is observing my peculiar tradition of not successfully reviewing my Bestest Books.....

[Wes Allen · Rating 4 out of 5]

The Public Burning by Robert Coover



Robert Coover’s The Public Burning brutally satirizes the zeitgeist of 1950s America, McCarthyism and the Red Scare, using as its focal point the execution of Julius and Ethel Rosenberg in 1953. While the book can get stymied in its penchant for historical minutiae, there is enough of Coover’s distinctive flair to keep the reader engaged for its 500+ pages. In particular, the Uncle Sam mythos, complete with plug hat and nonpareil patriotic zeal, livens The Public Burning. Nixon, too, figures integrally in the narrative, as about half of the text comes from his point of view..

Coover’s perspective on the Rosenberg case was only partially informed, as The Public Burning was published in 1977, many years before all the details of the case came to light. In fact, Julius and Ethel were as guilty of Soviet espionage as Nixon and the gang made them out to be. For this, did they deserve to burn in the electric chair? No. Their executions were a grand symbolic gesture, demonstrating to the world that the US was “tough on communism.” Prosecuted by Irving Saypol and judged by Irving Kaufman, with witnesses coached by J. Edgar Hoover and the boys, the US was hell-bent on getting its pound of flesh. Coover was wise to the injustice of the case, but his propensity to make innocent martyrs of the Rosenbergs may have been scaled back if The Public Burning were written today. That said, his decision to defend them is far preferable to the opposition.

And the opposition, as reified in Dick Nixon, has its own doubts. Old Iron Butt spearheads much of the Rosenberg case, but questions his stance throughout the novel, particularly in the last hundred pages or so. As noted, about half of The Public Burning--every other chapter–is from Nixon’s POV. He is a convincing amalgamation of the lofty and depraved, never straying too far toward caricature (though Coover’s distaste for him is palpable here and there). There is in him the scorning patriarch, as on p. 346: “Most people, I’ve found, are complete fools. . .” Then, the reader finds Nixon acting as the “Farting Quacker” on p. 144, indefensibly foolish and flatulent. Nonetheless, he remains ambitious, gunning for the presidency in ‘53, while grudgingly playing second fiddle to Eisenhower. But his ambition is not limited to the presidency: Nixon also fantasizes about possession by Uncle Sam, whose habit it is to incarnate political men of import.

This possession/incarnation by Uncle Sam is an eclectic element of The Public Burning, standing out like a red, white and blue plug hat in a monochrome crowd. The reader first meets him in the person of Eisenhower, golfing with Nixon at Burning Tree. Uncle Sam’s behavior is spastic, unpredictable and explosive. Shifting between tender, fatherly care and the obstreperous wrath of a vengeful god, Uncle Sam commands obeisance–he brooks no dissent. His style of speaking varies between patois and Old Testament judgment, a seeming antinomy that surprisingly works (see p. 89 in the Viking edition for representative dialogue).

Uncle Sam, however, is not the only mythic force in The Public Burning. In fact, he is but one side of a Manichaean duality, the other fulfilled by The Phantom. Throughout the novel, The Phantom is affiliated often with communism, but he/it is far larger than political economy; yes, The Phantom is the personification of nothing less than absolute evil. Like Uncle Sam, he too is in the salubrious habit of possession. On p. 273, he incarnates a cab driver who is ferrying Nixon about town. Nixon is on edge throughout the ride, sensing the futility of opposing The Phantom: “It wouldn’t do any good to grab him, I knew. The ungraspable Phantom. He was made of nothing solid, your hand would just slip right through, probably turn leprous forever.” Even Uncle Sam understands that, ultimately, The Phantom will be victorious. There is no lasting opposition to this force of darkness; it is nothing but one long, drawn-out defeat. On p. 436, Nixon gives voice to this sentiment in conversation with Ethel Rosenberg: “There is no purpose, there are no causes.”

While Uncle Sam and the patriot crew understand on a surface level that The Phantom is indomitable, it does not keep them from their zealous antipathy to communism. The last hundred pages or so of The Public Burning are a riotous crescendo to the burning itself. Held in Times Square, the executions are celebrated with elan, complete with song and dance numbers. Emceed by no less than Betty Crocker herself, the event is a soothing panacea for all the wronged peoples of America–and a way to appease that cancerous bloodlust lurking in the heart of man. “A mob, you see, does not act intelligently. Those who make up a mob do not think independently [. . .] A mob is bloodthirsty. A taste of blood will whet its appetite for more violence and for more blood“ (207).

Coover is not interested in an optimistic view of mankind. The Public Burning is scathing in its portrayal of America, peeling back the thin veneer of traditional values and morals to reveal the atrophied heart of the nation, the seared face of everyman, features contorted in great and terrifying panic.

[James · Rating 5 out of 5]

Robert Coover recently published The Brunist Day of Wrath, revisiting earlier territory in a highly anticipated (by hundreds at least) mammoth new novel.  One of the thoughts I had reading The Public Burning was that Coover could have easily returned to The Public Burning by looking at a recent era in American history.  

Imagine a novel where a Vice President named Dick, a cynical operator and foil to a relative political amateur from Texas, is seduced by the idea of becoming the living incarnation of Uncle Sam.  A man who views a recent crisis as losing a war with the evil that puts the country’s very way of life in jeopardy. As the machinations of Uncle Sam create a scenario for the destruction of another country in order to turn the tide against The Phantom (which has turned from communism to radical Islamists), Dick discovers that the evidence supporting the martyrdom of an entire country is dubious at best. In a late night cram session going over the evidence, Dick realizes that the yellow cake rumor is horseshit, the satellite images of mobile facilities for the production of weapons of mass destruction are just a collection of trucks in the desert, and the UN monitoring teams led by Hans Blix were right on the money when they said Iraq no longer had major stockpiles of WMDs.

In this moment the seeds are sown for an examination of Dick Cheney wrestling with his demons, whereby he eventually falls in love with the people of Iraq and makes an eleventh hour attempt to save them from the pain and destruction that will follow the shock and awe of Operation Iraqi Freedom. Imagine a novel where Dick is humanized by the conflict between his nationalism and the truth that Uncle Sam is perpetrating the murder of innocents to further his fight against the Phantom.  A novel in which we might even feel sympathetic to a politician that most Americans view as a ruthless power seeker who would not think twice before abusing that power to further his own agenda.  Naw… Coover is a great writer, but he’s not a miracle worker.  

Coover DOES manage to work wonders with the character of Dick Nixon.  The sections with Nixon were the highlight for me, a man who has become a caricature in American history.  Coover skillfully displays the inner workings of Nixon:  the man’s need for privacy and inability to connect with others on a personal level, his feelings of not measuring up, of being an outcast because of his upbringing in rural California and the effects of losing two brothers in childhood and his mother’s estrangement due to illness.  Along the way, Coover examines the Nixon biography through the eyes of his main character.  We see a man who is known as a grind (Ol’ Iron Butt), a man whose romantic intentions are seldom met with enthusiasm, the greatest bench warmer any football team has had this side of Rudy, a master debater, the actor of community theater, and the man who cut his political teeth as an Early Warning Sentinel in the fight against the Red Scare by taking down Alger Hiss.

The tougher sections of the book highlight the American Superhero Uncle Sam in his fight against the Sons of Darkness and the Phantom. The embodiment of America is shown to be a shifty profiteer and speaks in a form of English referred to in Blazing Saddles as “Authentic Frontier Gibberish”. Included in many of the scenes leading up to the Public Burning are fictional characters such as Betty Crocker and living ones such as Edgar Hoover, Joe McCarthy and Gary Cooper.  My favorite cameo from popular culture is by William Faulkner, who is asked to give some words on page 420.  Another scene I particularly enjoyed is the slapstick involving the Supreme Court Justices who vacated the stay of execution and can’t seem to find their way out of a giant smear of dung left behind by the Republican Elephant.  These scenes feature Coover at his most fantastic and satirical.  In fact, I found his satire hitting home with me and succeeding much better than Barth’s Giles Goat-Boy .  The Intermezzo scenes are in the format of a speech, a play or dramatic dialogue and an opera.  These sections show Coover’s playfulness as do other typographical shenanigans in the text and scenes where the characters show an awareness of being actors in a play.  My second hand first edition included a bit of ephemera from 1977, a receipt for payment of dental services from a dentist in Flint MI to an assumed previous owner named Gary.  For those who don’t like postmodern writing, The Public Burning might feel like a trip to the dentist.  For those who do…it might feel like the best carnival ride you’ve been on in years. Either way, it is worth dipping your toe in and deciding which camp you belong to.

[Geoff]

This book, The Public Burning by Robert Coover, is but a month and 19 days younger than myself (that is, if we determine the life of a book to begin on its publication date, and not the day it is conceived, which, if we were to do, would complicate things greatly and unnecessarily). So we have lived our Earth's time basically concurrently, this book and I. We are coevals. Mr. Coover's baby may have grown up to be a man much similar to myself. I just purchased a 1st edition VG+ copy of The Public Burning online for an even 5 American buckskins (dollars). So soon I'll be able to look it in its eye(s), size it up, and see how the years have treated it. (And I pray that my skin and bones and words might be worth more than 5 American bucks.)

[J · Rating 5 out of 5]

HOLY COW, this is a crazed, carnivalesque masterpiece. Coover brilliantly recreates the Rosenberg execution and the Red Scare of the early 50's, zooming in on both the major and minor players in the case with a level of exuberance and intense detail that usually only someone like Thomas Pynchon is capable of. And at the center of it all is then vice-president Richard Nixon, weirdly humanized but still impossibly self absorbed and self-pitying, his mind running at a paranoid, invective filled pace that would ultimately be his undoing.

I'm just going to say, this is the greatest fictional portrayal of Nixon ever rendered. Even the head-in-a-glass-jar in Futurama can't compete with Coover's take on his exuberant misanthropy and self-serving nature. That he ends up forming the sincere, reflective emotional core of this book while still being ridiculed is a remarkable satirical feat. At times the book reads almost like a comic, with it's bright swirl of colors and it's crazed American Zeitgeist set pieces which just keep building up into ever more elaborate, ever more ludicrous renditions as the narrative rushes to its electrifying, (pun intended) ordained spectacle of conclusion.

And just when you think things have reached their crazed end, Coover ratchets things up to 11 with a denouement so obscene, so completely bat-shit insane, that…well, I almost can't believe that this wasn't burned in the streets when it came out. This is American satire on a hysterical, almost mythical scale, and it goes out with all guns blazing. If Herman Melville and Mark Twain had a kid and that kid was raised by Thomas Pynchon, he would write something like this. I highly, HIGHLY recommend this.

[Christopher Saunders · Rating 4 out of 5]

Robert Coover's The Public Burningis a madcap, or else simply mad political picaresque reimagining the deaths of Julius and Ethel Rosenberg as a public execution, attended by a mob of frenzied onlookers, angered protesters, entertainers, politicians, religious leaders and an anthropomorphized Uncle Sam, presided over by Vice President Richard Nixon. Originally published in 1977, Coover's book was rejected by one publisher, suppressed by another, then pulled from the shelves after becoming a best-seller for fear of triggering lawsuits from Nixon and others portrayed therein. It's difficult to summarize a work this wild: think Mark Twain meets Hunter S. Thompson (with a splash of E.L. Doctorow), a shambling exercise in gonzo Americana that's alternately brilliant and baffling, insightful and insufferable. The novel lurches between sharp parodies of politics as spectacle and Cold War hysteria and rabid, leering caricature. Coover never misses a chance to vulgarize or humiliate his subjects, whether in an improbable jailhouse tryst between Nixon and Ethel Rosenberg; Jack Benny, Groucho Marx and others performing comedy sketches based on Rosenberg's Death House letters; pompous Eisenhower speeches rendered in e.e. cummings-style blank verse; Supreme Court justices and ex-presidents wrestling in elephant dung; the perpetually tumescent, aphorism-spouting Uncle Sam, locked in a superhero duel with the Communist Phantom (whose most tangible manifestation is a vulgar cabbie who steals Nixon's shoe); and a climactic act of sodomy as tasteless to the reader as it is traumatizing to its recipient. I wouldn't classify this as great literature, exactly - in some ways, it's not even good - but it's certainly a fascinating read, one of the most gloriously tasteless black comedies in the American Canon.

[Heronimo Gieronymus · Rating 5 out of 5]

Vice President Richard Milhous Nixon, summarily pantsed. Yeehaw. And that ain't the least of it. Robert Coover is a monster, and his bigger, brasher books are themselves humbling (and generally gleefully appalling) monsters. THE PUBLIC BURNING may be the mother of them all. This is the quintessential American novel of the carnivalesque. Mikhail Bakhtin originally conceptualized the carnivalesque as a subset of literature (and culture at large) that takes from the carnival its gleeful and mocking upending of proper social values (the high becomes low the low becomes high). And what could be more carnivalesque than the pantsing of Richard Nixon in Times Square, the huddled masses hee-hawing and grab-assing before him? This is also, of course, a sinister book written in a sinister time about another sinister time not long passed. Nixon bridged these times, and concurrently finds himself spread-eagled before Coover's malicious comic scalpel. But history, folks: history is a nightmare, and I would begrudge you not if it were one from which you are hoping to awaken. Coover will make you laugh big, snorting, milk-out-yr-nostrils larffs, but he won't pull punches. It is not just the American Gestalt; the whole of capital-H History is a big fucking public-ass burning. Nasty, nasty business, and Christ you had better learn to laugh. So THE PUBLIC BURNING is not pretty, but it is boisterous, trenchant, the apotheosis of postmodern ironic (Groucho Marx, the greatest American ironist, makes an appearance), supremely daring (the only publisher willing to go w/ it at the time dropped it fast like a hot litigable potato), and maybe the great comic American novel of that most American of centuries. A great big rollicking riot w/ double middle fingers brazenly deployed.

[Nathan · Rating 5 out of 5]

This book is insane. Absolutely insane. To call it just political satire is such an understatement. It is vicious, vile, and furious. It takes things a step too far and then some. It taps into American fear and paranoia in a way that is completely ludicrous, yet at the same time thoughtful and sincere.

[Andrew]

Where to even begin? Even as Thomas Pynchon is a college-lit staple, even as David Foster Wallace is popular enough he can get played by Jason freakin' Segel, Coover has, it seems, fallen by the wayside. Which is a damn shame. Especially with a novel like The Public Burning.

And where to start with The Public Burning? This is postmodernism that gives you feels, man. Because Nixon is as pathetic and self-loathing as he is menacing, and you feel wretched for him. You wish he'd had more shoulders to cry on. And his silly pillow talk with Ethel Rosenberg... you mock him for his sentimentality that only seems to come out post-coitally, but at the same time, you think of everything you've said in bed, and how horrible it would seem if it came out out of context. Or at least I did.

And then Nixon gets involved in rather less salubrious acts with Uncle Sam. The real Uncle Sam, who talks a bit like Yosemite Sam got thrown in a blender with the war-flick incarnation of John Wayne. You know, 'Murican, as the Twitter types would say. Betty Crocker's around too, and she's like a giant Oedipal chip on the shoulder. And you wonder, maybe, is this where Murakami got the inspiration for his Colonel Sanders and Johnny Walker characters in Kafka on the Shore?

Oh, and did I mention, that if all this sounds like postmodernist silliness, you shouldn't be afraid, because it's a page-turner. It might be experimental, but it's also tense and funny and (other beach-read adjectives, you know the usuals), while at the same time being brilliant and ominous and (other high-lit adjectives, you know the usuals).

Now just go read the damn thing. If you're going to do one nice thing for yourself today, maybe masturbate, but if you're going to do two nice things, pick up The Public Burning.

[John · Rating 5 out of 5]

The Public Burning is a book that I cannot believe I waited this long to read. It’s been on my radar for the last three years and my first edition hardcover that I found for $3 has sat on my shelf for nearly two. Billed with heavy praise from a select few of trusted reader friends I often heard things like “this is the only book of the 70s to rival Gravity’s Rainbow”. That statement is a big claim and after having finished this book I kind of have to agree.

Published in 1977 and quickly taken off the shelves, this book looks to comment on post Watergate America through the lens of an earlier setting. Stepping back 24 years to revisit America during the Rosenberg trial of 1953. An event rarely discussed in modern discourse, Coover looks to display the grand pageantry and absurd surrealism of American culture, history, and politics; the event of Ethel and Julius Rosenberg being executed by the state, having been believed to have shared the secrets of the atomic bomb with the Soviet Union.

As someone with a great affinity for history and took all advanced courses in high school and college I’m always amazed with how novice I am to certain monumental moments in US history. An early example of Cold War paranoia, the Rosenberg trial really is an essential point in understanding how America got to where it is today, something that I think Coover masterfully captures in The Public Burning.

Coover takes this event and shows it for more than just its course of events. He takes this trial and paints the grander picture of American Imperialism and authoritarianism with its events. While evidence still is unclear about the Rosenberg’s hand in the Soviets gaining access to nuclear capabilities, what is clear is that the United States government killed two of its citizens because the possibility of it being true posed that much of a threat. They needed to set an example and hammer in the McCarthyist jingoism of the Red Scare 1950s.

A catalyst for worse to come. This is an early example of America’s shift in the postwar landscape of the latter 20th Century and ultimately where we find ourselves today. I think why the Rosenberg Trial is left out of most discussions of American history is that it is overshadowed by much worse events and atrocities in the decades that followed it.

That being said, you wouldn’t necessarily believe that by Coover's description of events. He makes this out to be the event of the century. A spectacle with such magnitude that it was impossible to avoid.

Centralizing the book around the week leading up to the Rosenberg’s execution, we start with a prologue that sets you right in this time period of American history. Describing the early Cold War atmosphere of the beginning of the 1950s, we get a real sense for the kind of landscape where this trial is birthed from. The Korean War, the expanding divide between East and West Germany, Red Scare witch hunts of homefront Communists, and of course the Soviet Union growing to become the nuclear powered super power boogeyman of decades to follow. This lengthy prologue sets the tone perfectly in a way that felt very akin to John Dos Passos’ descriptions of America in his USA Trilogy.

The USA Trilogy has held my spot for The Great American Novel™ ever since I first read it a few years ago but I believe we have a new contender here with The Public Burning. This book really accomplishes so much and feels predictive of so much of what we see today in American society. It has a wide reach but focusing around this trial and a small cast of characters it is a lot easier to grasp than one might anticipate.

Outside of the historical events of the Rosenberg Trial, we follow two main characters. Uncle Sam, a human embodiment of American exceptionalism, and then Vice President Richard Nixon. While focusing mainly on Nixon, these two characters make up the vast majority of the book and really are some of my favorite characters I’ve read all year.

Having been published three years after Nixon’s resignation, Coover utilizes The Public Burning as a way to channel frustrations with Nixon through an earlier iteration of the man. This version of Nixon is one still vying for power and more green to the political system. He is portrayed here as a highly neurotic and comical character. Most of the book is spent with the thoughts of Nixon as he makes his way through life in the week leading up to the execution. It truly is amazing how well crafted this character is and it is unnerving to spend so much time in his mind. It is even more unnerving to imagine Coover getting in this Nixon mindset to craft this character.

The other major character we have is Uncle Sam who is an almost otherworldly being. A caricature of America in the way that the image of Uncle Sam has been used throughout US history to portray patriotism at the highest degree. I really enjoyed reading about this character and honestly wish there was more. The way he speaks in popular phrases straight from presidential speeches to the way that he physically embodies manifest destiny in the ways he over extends his reach in situations. Being able to portray the concept of America with a human-like character really is an incredible feat that I haven’t seen done like this elsewhere.

From early on we get to see these two interact as its clear Uncle Sam is scouting the next successor for the presidency. Nixon, thirsting for power and approval, is more than willing to go along with Uncle Sam to get in with his favor. An early favorite chapter of this book was the golf course scene where we really get to see these two interact.

As the book progresses we get to see the ultimate conclusion of these characters interacting in a way that is as satirical as it is commenting on the nature of American politics. But I’m getting ahead of myself.

We follow Nixon through this week and see who he really is. We get reflections on his earlier life, his aspirations, and his downfalls as a man. We also get to see him in a lot of really silly situations. Coover takes no break in ridiculing Nixon, putting him in embarrassing situations. While this makes the American nature of this book even more prominent through its constant usage of the First Amendment, it also looks to dig deeper into the dark world of American politics and imperialism.

There is a scene later on where Nixon ends up in front of a crowd of all of America with his pants down. He is able to brush this off and turn it into a grandiose moment by getting everyone else to join him in dropping their pants too. While silly, this shows how America will follow its President even in the most ridiculous situations, taking pride in the brash, crass, or embarrassing nature of their actions. As someone who first became aware of the American reputation at large during the Bush Administration this has always been the case in my lifetime, and showcasing it here shows it has existed long before then. We don’t even have to mention where it's gotten to today.

Coover has created a masterpiece here. He balances grander commentary with great comedy. He has crafted deep characters and vivid scenes of historical accuracy as well as surreal dreamlike quality. He switches styles from stream of consciousness, to play scripts, to poetic prose. He does this all with great wordplay and attention grabbing hooks that keep you going with each sentence.

If Gravity’s Rainbow was the nuclear blast that set things off in the postmodern literary landscape of the 1970s, The Public Burning is the fallout from that blast. Where Gravity’s Rainbow is a spectacle that leaves you in awe and unsure of what you just encountered, The Public Burning is the more direct and targeted display, showcasing what can be done with the written word in this way.

It is amazing to consider that when this book was first published Richard Nixon was still very much alive and the kind of book this is aimed to take him on directly. Now in his passing the legacy he leaves is one of embarrassment and public ridicule, much of which is best immortalized here in the pages of this book.

[Melody · Rating 3 out of 5]

The Public Burning is a curious mix of fact and fiction whose characters include: Betty Crocker, Jack Kennedy, Marilyn Monroe, the Marx Brothers, Mamie and Ike Eisenhower, Billy Graham, and starring Dick Nixon, Uncle Sam, The Phantom and Ethel and Julius Rosenberg. The story of America’s extreme fear of communism during the 50s and the execution of the Rosenberg’s (the only American civilians to be put to death for espionage) is told primarily through Vice President Nixon, (who is depicted to be an almost likeable character). Uncle Sam (a combination of Samuel Clemons and Yosemite Sam with just a smidgen of Daffy Duck) makes regular appearances to encourage Nixon to make sure the Rosenberg’s execution is carried out and to warn him to be on the lookout for The Phantom (who represents the threat of communism).

I must say, reading the book was not unlike running a marathon for me. I almost returned it to the library without finishing it several times, but talked myself out of it. I fought with Coover’s writing style and humor but hung in there, determined to read every last page. There were enough interesting things mentioned along the way that caused me to stop and look them up to see if they were fact or fiction (and I discovered there is a surprising amount of fact in the book). This contributed to the time it took for me to finish the book because I would become curious about something and then it involved tracking down quotes by Bull Conner or reading about Abel Meeropol, (who wrote the song “Strange Fruit” and later adopted the orphaned Rosenberg children) or determining if Eisenhower was really ever struck by lightning or reminding myself what Mamie looked like. There were several passages that were laugh-out-loud funny but for the most part I trudged along, determined to make it to the end. But after I finished I decided I liked it. I wanted to discuss it, learn more about the Rosenbergs, and reread paragraphs. So even if I didn’t enjoy the actual reading of it, I’m very glad I read it. I’ll let you draw your own conclusions about my marathon running attitude.

[Martin Zook · Rating 5 out of 5]

Remember when British reporter David Frost asked former President Nixon what his greatest error was during the Watergate crisis?

With a straight face, Nixon hemmed and hawed: "I was too nice a guy."

Therein lies Tricky Dick's capacity to delude himself that Robert Coover recognizes so brilliantly. Throughout The Public Burning, a sendup of Nixon and America of extraordinary magnitude, Nixon opines on the big questions facing him, the Eisenhower administration, and the country; but unwaveringly comes back to Nixon and how he can twist things around in his mind to put his image in the most favorable light.

And, without exception, the picture he conjures is as deluded as his response to Frost's question.

Coover's treatment of Nixon is unmerciful. The shifty one's ability to weave a delusion around a slush fund during his Checker's speech, his personal life (especially his elevation of his playwrighting skills) where Nixon imagines he would have excelled at any profession, and his career as a red baiter exemplified by the central plot of the execution (in Time Square no less) of Julius and Ethel Rosenberg on the questionable grounds that they gave the atom bomb to the Soviets.

Uncle Sam, a ruthless and bombastic phantom character is Nixon's foil and mentor. Coover's Sam belongs on a Mt. Rushmore of characters in American literature, along with Melville's Confidence Man, McCarthy's Judge Holden, Any of Faulkner's Snopes, and Penn Warren's Willie Stark.

But, before mentioning some of the larger implications of TPB and the faults of the country that it reflects like a panoramic mirror, there are some hilarious scenes that beg mention, not the least of which is Nixon's masturbating while sexually fantasizing about an encounter with a young Ethel Rosenberg, as well as a visit to Sing Sing during which he and Ethel find themselves clutching one another in a rather warm embrace. The set piece of Sam tutoring a young Nixon on the golf course is not to be missed, and of course the final setting of the execution in Times Square, which features all of America from Disney and Betty Crocker to the Marx Brothers and (less than) Supreme Court wallowing in elephant poop.

Nixon is Coover's primary target, but it's Nixon as a manifestation of America, or at least many of its faults. Coover's Nixon reacts in knee jerk reaction to that he doesn't know. On the golf links with Sam, he realizes he doesn't know the facts of the case. No matter. He grabs for power without a clear idea, actually remote idea, of what he wishes to accomplish. It's because he must be at the center of attention.

Nixon himself annihilates Eisenhower, who lifted him to the position the vp enjoys, without the empathy that the tricky one would bestow on himself. In fact Nixon sees himself as the playwright/director of large events. It's framed by a college play he authored, The Dark Tower, but which defines the roles of those who are better socially adjusted, more talented, above Nixon.

Nixon ultimately is an extension of the insane carnival that gathers for the Rosenberg's execution in the electric chair set on a stage.

There is one other phantom with a prominent role here, a counter figure to Uncle Sam. It's the Phantom, a vaguely formed image that includes the Soviets, especially, but any of Nixon/American enemies. The Phantom is unique in that unlike Sam, the Phantom has not a word in these 534 pages, nor an appearance other than through the eyes of Sam, or Nixon.

As Sam/Nixon note on several occasions, it's not the facts that count. It's the story. And Coover's story is trumps.

[Erik · Rating 5 out of 5]

Five stars, no kidding, if I could give six or seven I would. This is a Great American Novel, in lurid stars and stripes and in gorgeous multilayered language and characters. The plot is the runup to an imagined execution of the Rosenbergs in a orgiastic death-fest in Times Square. Not all of the characters were familiar to me as the action is a little before my time. But you'll sure recognize the main ones, Uncle Sam, and Tricky Dick Nixon. Nixon is (as William Gass says in his introduction) probably a more sensitive, deeply rendered character than the actual man was himself. You feel for Nixon's schlubbiness and middlemindedness and Coover almost makes a lovable loser out of him, relating pathetic episodes of his history, but ultimately the ego and unprincipled power lust, the cowardly red-baiting, win out and we recognize our man. Uncle Sam however is pure unconcealed Americana, bare knuckled rage, hucksterism, hoopla, nationalist fervor, alligator wrestler and everything else. No character sums up the national character quite like this and the prose, ooo la la. Sections like the Prologue, the epiphany at Burning Tree golf course, the encounter between Nixon and Ethel Rosenberg, the execution and the final apotheosis of Nixon (Uncle Sam: "You're my boy!") are classic. There are some more fantastic elements, like the section on the New York Times and Time magazine, or the opera-buffa between the Rosenbergs and the Warden, that are slightly over the top. We are also treated to an exhautive account of the Rosenbergs' life and a look inside Nixon's self-centered mind, constantly reliving his childhood and seeing himself as a hero of Lincoln-esque stature ("I'm a lot like Lincoln." Yeah right!). This might be more than you want to know about the man, but the comic payoff and the cumulative effect are worth it.

[Justin Zigenis · Rating 4 out of 5]

The spirit of America is embodied by carnival barker Uncle Sam…

“‘Remember, you shall have joy, or you shall have power,’ admonished Uncle Sam, (speaking to Nixon while in euphemistic fashion he attempts to yank his shirttail out his fly) ‘but you can’t have both with the same hand!’”

Endless digressions of paranoia regarding the red scare of Communism manifest as The Phantom, Uncle Sam’s arch enemy, to threaten America’s Christian values (a mutated version reminiscent of the absurd marriage between politics and religion, that golden-age variety so recently romanticized roughly half the U.S.).
Time (magazine) emerges as America’s Poet Laureate. His sister is Fortune, and High Times the bastard brother.

“‘Time will reveal everything,’ Euripides prophesied. ‘He is a babbler, and speaks even when not asked.’”

It’s a LONG book. Under 600 pages, yes, but in a minuscule typeface, and very little dialogue. And yet the entire novel takes place over 3 successive days. The bulk of the narrative is Nixon blathering on about America, Eisenhower, Julius and Ethel Rosenberg, Communism…and all this sounds god-awfully dull, but throw in absurdist humor, a little wisdom, and Uncle Sam literally fucking Nixon in the ass, and it amounts to a satisfying read.

It does leave me curious though about whether I’d feel the same way had I lived through the scandal myself. If a similar satire were presently written in Trump’s voice, would I disregard it as tabloid fodder? Of course, his narrative voice would be virtually unreadable, whereas Nixon wields a lifetime of political experience to linguistically karate chop his own demons and physical opponents… that is until the end.

Negative 1-star because it’s too damn long.

[Dan · Rating 3 out of 5]

Employing both fact and fiction (including some magic realism), The Public Burning is a novel of black humor that satirizes Cold War paranoia.

That Coover's novel included a liberally fictionalized (the modifier is intended quantitatively, not politically) Richard M. Nixon as a major character was a fairly significant issue when the work appeared in 1977. These days, particularly in what is coming to be termed the "post-truth" era, anyone with a computer and an Internet connection can publish fictions naming real people and representing them as implicated in any range of activities, and can do all of this anonymously. Back then, though, Coover had trouble getting his book published due to the legal challenges that could have arisen in response to his satiric depictions of Nixon and other actual persons (for those interested in literary caricatures of Nixon, check out Philip Roth's 1971 book Our Gang with its main character Trick E. Dixon).

Also significant is that while the novel appeared at a time when Watergate and Nixon's disgraced presidency was still a recent memory, the action of Coover's work is set much earlier, during Nixon's vice-presidency, and specifically during a three-day period in June 1953 that ended with the execution for espionage of Julius and Ethel Rosenberg (both of whom are also major characters in the book).

Like Thomas Pynchon in Gravity's Rainbow and Don DeLillo in Libra, Coover includes a lot of historical detail in his novel. As I read it, I did not worry too much about separating fact from fiction (in general, it seems fairly obvious where in his narrative Coover is exercising artistic license). These days, readers have any number of online resources to explore the period and people upon which Coover has based his work. (The year I read it, 2001, was the same year that Wikipedia was launched).

The Public Burning is one of those "Big Fat Books Worth the Effort." I read it once, and would definitely read it again.

Acquired May 30, 2000
Used book store in Buffalo NY