Gerald's Party by Robert Coover eBook
Robert Coover's wicked and surreally comic novel takes place at a chilling, ribald, and absolutely fascinating party. Amid the drunken guests, a woman turns up murdered on the living room floor. Around the corpse, one of several the evening produces, Gerald's party goes on — a chatter of voices, names, faces, overheard gags, rounds of storytelling, and a mounting curve of desire. What Coover has in store for his guests (besides an evening gone mad) is part murder mystery, part British parlor drama, and part sly and dazzling meditation on time, theater, and love.
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praise
From Library Journal
"We have the past, we have the future," muses Gerald, "but what we never seem to be able to get ahold of is the present." In this major novel, Coover and his narrator mean to invoke the present, and to suggest again the illusory nature of the other states. Our host's evening starts off with the corpse of a promiscuous minor actress, and an anticipated affair for him. But a parodic police inspector, a few more deaths, a blocked toilet, and a director out to make a play of corpse and motley guests keep things moving in improbable directions that dovetail with ideas on theater, time, and love. The secret of Coover's art is amazing juxtapositionof philosophy, scatology, disparate conversations, acts, memories, and metaphorical inventionall powered by the author's enormous verbal energies. Despite a humorous first impression, this isn't an easy book to enter. But it has "the power of play to provoke unexpected insights, . . . excite the heart . . . and perhaps persuade that, after all, there's no time like the present. . . ." Jeff Clark, SUNY Coll. at Old Westbury Lib.
Copyright 1986 Reed Business Information, Inc.
about the author
Robert Coover has published fourteen novels, three books of short fiction, and a collection of plays since The Origin of the Brunists received the William Faulkner Foundation First Novel Award in 1966. His short fiction has appeared in the NewYorker,Harper's, and Playboy, amongst many other publications.
