The postmodern author Robert Coover died this weekend. I wasn’t a widely-read Coover fan; I didn’t know until reading obituaries that he was a pioneer of early electronic literature and hypertext fiction. And I haven’t yet read his most popular works, the controversial The Public Burning or the very Blaseball-sounding The Universal Baseball Association. My main foray into Coover has been in the form of his two hefty novels about unions and cults, 1966’s The Origin of the Brunists and its 2014 sequel, The Brunist Day of Wrath.
I’ll admit to not quite being through Wrath, which at over 1000 pages is twice as long as Origin. I’m not one to shy away from a long book, but both feel longer than their page count thanks to one of the qualities I admire most about them: practically every character gets explored in-depth, with the narrative going off on tangents and digressions until it’s hard to remember what was happening in the main plot at all. Both books focus on the fictional town of West Condon, where a mine explosion inspired by true events traps nearly 100 workers inside. The only survivor is Giovanni Bruno, and as the town reels to make sense of the disaster, a cult springs up around him, with the movement ultimately predicting the end of the world.
Origin explores the formation of the cult and its effect on the town, while Wrath focuses on what happens after their prophecy fails. (Origin starts on the night of the apocalypse, so it’s pretty obvious the prediction doesn’t come to pass; but as Coover writes in Wrath, “For the rest of the world, the end might not have come that day, but for West Condon, it surely did.”) Bruno isn’t a very charismatic leader, spending much of his rise to fame in a coma; instead, he’s uplifted by different townspeople and their reactions to the mine disaster, with a swirling universe of supporters and detractors giving meaning to his every gesture and look. All of this is followed by Justin “Tiger” Miller, a high school basketball hero turned reporter, who covers the Brunists for the local paper. Coover writes of Miller’s return to town, “he keeps going soft just when you expect the best of him… [W]hile most people saw his return to take over the Chronicle as a heroic kind of yea-saying, if not indeed an act of grace, there were those, even then, who wondered if Tiger might not simply have run out of wind out there in the world and returned to rest up awhile in a place where heroism was still possible without sticking to training rules.”
It’s hard for me not to root for a journalist protagonist, and we see Miller get sucked into everyone in town’s drama. He’s also a vector for the stuff I like the least about Origin: long narrative wanders into relationships and sex scenes that must have seemed transgressive when it was written, but felt off-putting and dated to me today. But a good thing about Origin is that there’s so much stuff in it that it’s easy to find something to like, which for me was how broadly and honestly Coover explores both the internal and external expression of religion.
Some characters who come to follow Bruno are earnestly religious, or they reject him because of conflicting religious conviction. Others get swept up through more earthly avenues, like their anger at the mining company or through their relationship to other followers. Coover paints a fascinating picture of how a belief takes hold and spreads, how a feeling becomes a movement and how a movement becomes an organization. By giving every character time on the page, Coover creates a complicated web of followers, where the cult isn’t just “the cult,” but characters the reader knows and cares about. We see how religion intersects with the real world: how the faith connects to West Condon’s decline or to the union's internal politics or to the ways the town’s church doesn’t meet everyone’s needs or to how, as, Wrath puts it, “for the mine company fat cats the disaster wasn’t nothing more than one bad hand.” Coover never makes a call on if anyone is “right” or “wrong,” instead letting everyone speak for themselves until the reader is faced with a chorus of religion, politics, romance, and labor.
It feels like Coover loves these characters, even the most incidental. While reading, I speculated that he knew the name and story of literally everyone in his fictional town. While I think he falls prey to one of the harder things to resist as a fiction writer–getting enamoured with your backstories and putting them all in the book, even if the book doesn’t strictly need them–telling the story in this way is clearly the literary project he’s on. Coover has a character think in Wrath that “The world, someone has said, is a book written by the hand of God in which every creature is a word charged with meaning,” and that definitely seems to be how Coover himself feels. He balances the individual with the group eloquently, or zooms from a close third person to an omniscient narrator while skillfully staying out of the reader's way. Even in one more zoomed-out passage of Origin, he still keeps things hugely specific:
And so, tonight, fathers worry about their daughters, wives about their husbands, ministers about their flocks, doctors about their patients, Brunists about how they will meet the End, doubters about the truth, the mayor about the embarrassment and the shame and the next elections, businessmen about the slump and miners about unemployment, children about their aging parents, just about all West Condoners worry a moment or two, unless they have dropped off blissfully before the TV, about their health or their virility or their weight or their period or their happiness or when and how they’re going to die.
Origin is a tough book to get through, especially with its giant cast and wandering story and some of its datedness. Though Wrath was published in 2014, it still keeps some of the same tone that I'd hoped was a product of Origin's time, but this feels clearly like the literary school Coover is in. Coover’s passing has inspired me to get back to it, though; the world of West Condon and the Brunists is so strange and unique and thoughtful, stuffed in such an unlikely way with so many of the things I’m interested in. It's so full that there’s surely something for you there if you stick with it. Reading, I can feel Coover’s love of not just his world but the world in general, of the people who live in it and the stories they tell themselves and each other. As he writes in Origin,
West Condon came alive as Miller walked through it. First day of spring and, on impulse, he’d decided to leave the Chevy at home, walk to the Chronicle. Still needed the trenchcoat, but he wore it open. Women appeared to sweep porches, men laughed foolishly from autos, children ran and shouted. Bicycles bounced down off porches. He heard the whump-whump of a basketball bouncing on cinders. The cool rains of the last couple days had sunk a fragrance into the soil that the sudden vernal sun this Saturday morning exploited gaudily. Who would think some here saw an end to it all?
