Robert Coover has turned Chaplin on his head. In Charlie in the House of Rue Coover has placed the Little Tramp in a house where his timing, no matter how perfect, can not draw from the other characters the slightest response.

At first, the Tramp is merely annoyed by this. But Coover doesn't just pose for us the "what if nobody responded" question. He goes a step further and sets the supporting characters on their own courses.

The beautiful woman, whom the Tramp is mystified and made humble by, tries to commit suicide. While attempting to keep her from her course—jumping off the top of the staircase—the Tramp accidentally pushes her over the edge, where she dangles by the rope around her neck while he scampers around the foyer and second storey trying to get her down. Even Charlie grabbing for his baggy pants to keep them up, then his derby to keep it on, then his pants, then his derby, pants, derby, pants, derby, can't bring humor to this grisly scene.

The bald man, yes, the ubiquitous bald man with the thick mustache and suspenders, whose pate is used for everything, including an ashtray, gives the Tramp his comeuppance by standing at the kitchen table, looking into the soup that he has been sullenly staring at throughout the story, and promptly urinating into it….

The lights are always going out on the Tramp, and he finds himself in a place he never thought he'd be. He strikes the man, only to find it is the woman…. By the three-quarter point of the book, the story is moving at breakneck speed, yet there is no more slapstick to the pratfalls. It is no longer Chaplin, not even Olson and Johnson.

Once again, Coover has created a character beyond the edge, one who has taken his lunacy to the point where it turns on him.

Charlie has none of the political overtones of The Public Burning, where a crazed Richard Nixon goes out of his mind persecuting the Rosenbergs. The book stays away from religion, the theme of The Origin of the Brunists, Coover's first novel, which won him a William Faulkner Award in 1966. In Brunists, a Pennsylvania small-town newspaper editor turns the survivor of a mineshaft accident into a new messiah.

Charlie is closest to The Universal Baseball Association Inc., J. Henry Waugh Prop., in which a man devises a dice-roll baseball game to amuse himself, only to have it envelop him to the point where his reality becomes that of the league, the games and the players.

The thread that runs through all Coover's work is the notion of America gone haywire, the fiercely independent character, always in control, suddenly out of control, no longer a part of the world around him. In Coover's world, not only do Americans have no history, but no reality. They are merely the lines of type in a newspaper, the statistics in a baseball record book and, finally, fleeting images on a moving-picture screen.