Robert Coover The Babysitter
Robert Coover New Yorker

'Going for a Beer' by Robert Coover Originally published in the March 15, 2011 issue of The New Yorker. This week’s short story takes up a single three-column page in the magazine, easy enough to read while waiting in line somewhere. Robert Coover’s central concern is the human being’s need for fiction. Because of the complexity of human existence, people are constantly inventing patterns that give them an illusion of order in. Coover’s next book, the 1969 short-story collection Pricksongs and Descants, also pranked the reader’s unconscious assumptions about narrative structure. The book’s three most famous stories — “The Babysitter,” “The Magic Poker,” and “The Elevator” — are direct attacks on story logic; rather than following a linear plot.

The article discusses the fiction writing style in Robert Coover's 'The Magic Poker.' Coover's short story is labeled as experimental with texts insulating the implications from the main body of a classic prose fiction.

Robert Coover The Babysitter

Robert Coover New Yorker

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by Robert Coover

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With a new Introduction by Kate Atkinson 'Robert Coover is one of America's finest stylists, a master of elegant nuance, subtle intent and darkly subversive humour' John Banville In his carnivalesque and riotously inventive Pricksongs & DescantsRobert Coover remakes old stories- of Red Riding Hood, Hansel and Gretel, and Beauty (who married her Beast and spends a lifetime suffering his doggy stink). And he reshapes his own- a man makes repeating, re-imagined journeys in an office elevator (while his fellow riders taunt and tempt him), and in the seminal, fractal 'The Babysitter' every moment in a single night is played and replayed, every hope and threat of sex and violence done and undone. Coover's dark, wilfil, comic imagination revels brilliantly in contradictions, a master of chaos. 'Mr Coover's work has long occupied a place of honour . . . He goes at his task with an almost alarming linguistic energy, a Burgessy splatter of vocabulary, and a ferocious love of everything comic and grotesque' Salmon Rushdie… (more)

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Quite an unusual collection of stories, to say the least. Some need multiple re-readings, or at least time to assimilate, like The Panel, and some are grotesque, like The Marker. However, some are more accessible, and even playful. The structure of some allow for multiple scenarios, like the famous ' The Babysitter. Other favorites were The Pedestrian Accident, The Hat Act, The Brother and The Elevator. I read somewhere that the title of the collection comes from early music, where plucked notes lie below an upper melody or descant. That makes sense for the stories that are take offs on fairy tales, like The Doors and The Gingerbread House. ( )

steller0707 | Aug 25, 2019 |

He pronounces it aloud, smiles faintly, sadly, somewhat wearily, then continues his tedious climb, pausing from time to time to stare back down the stairs behind him.
When the time arrives for resolution, I will be there. One day soon the followers of Coover will engage those of Barth tooth and claw. There will be no quarter. The scene will remind us of Bangkok and we will wear the shirt of Coover proudly. Through the tear-gas and vitriol we will triumph. Our cause will prevail because of the brilliance of The Magic Poker and The Babysitter. These two exercises astonish in their smutty Impressionism. It will be admitted that I was sometimes too impatient or ill-equipped to truly delight in all of the pieces presented here.
Where Barth paints with manic glee about Story, Coover recycles his own variations, distilling a Gestalt where the dross whispers of all outcomes and the reader's imagination trembles in capacity. Hope remains --and victory will be ours. Coover Rules!
( )

jonfaith | Feb 22, 2019 |

Book Description
Pricksongs & Descants, originally published in 1969, is a virtuoso performance that established its author - already a William Faulkner Award winner for his first novel - as a writer of enduring power and unquestionable brilliance, a promise he has fulfilled over a stellar career. It also began Coover's now-trademark riffs on fairy tales and bedtime stories. In these riotously word-drunk fictional romps, two children follow an old man into the woods, trailing bread crumbs behind and edging helplessly toward a sinister end that never comes; a husband walks toward the bed where his wife awaits his caresses, but by the time he arrives she's been dead three weeks and detectives are pounding down the door; a teenaged babysitter's evening becomes a kaleidoscope of dangerous erotic fantasies-her employer's, her boyfriend's, her own; an aging, humble carpenter marries a beautiful but frigid woman, and after he's waited weeks to consummate their union she announces that God has made her pregnant. Now available in a Grove paperback, Pricksongs & Descants is a cornerstone of Robert Coover's remarkable career and a brilliant work by a major American writer.
My Review
I'm glad I read this book because it is a unique style of writing but by the end of the book I was getting a little tired of the ambiguity and nonsense. If you like different styles of writing, you may find this book rather interesting. ( )

EadieB | Jun 1, 2016 |

I'm glad I read this book because it is a unique style of writing but by the end of the book I was getting a little tired of the ambiguity and nonsense. If you like different styles of writing, you may find this book rather interesting. ( )

EadieB | Jan 19, 2016 |

The short stories in this collection were so different from each other and from everything else I’ve ever read that it’s hard to know where to begin with this book. Some of them were retellings of well-known stories and fairy tales, although many of those were so obscure that I wasn’t

The Magic Poker Robert Coover Summary