Like a child who pats a pile of wet sand into turrets and crenelated ramparts, Robert Coover prods at our most banal distractions and vulgar obsessions, nudging them into surreal and alarming forms. His fictions—novels, stories and, in ["A Theological Position"], plays—sound at times like incantations which, as they progress, mount to frenzy. What began slowly, seemingly grounded in homely realistic details, lurches, reels a bit, becomes possessed by manic excitation; the characters' faces dissolve to reveal archetypal forms beneath; time and direction come unglued; the choices a writer makes to send his story one way or another are ignored so that simultaneously all possible alternatives occur and, at the end, as often as not, we find our laughter contracting in our throats because some of Coover's stories can be fearsome indeed.

From fantasies that crowd our minds in idle moments Coover's best tales come. At first simple distractions, the fantasies assume control…. A baby-sitter arrives and, for a moment, her employer is distracted by lust. Images gnaw at the corners of this man's consciousness; certain scenes recur, theme and variations, as the pace accelerates. Which are "real," which imagined? Where, in fact, is the point of departure, the tonic note? (p. 97)

This is Coover's most intriguing skill: while casting his stories loose from time and realism, he maintains the form and pace that narrative requires, shaping from banal details stories and symbols that have the timelessness, the compelling but oblique reality, of myth. He plays, too, with literary stories that have the qualities of myth, revising them to remind us of the eternal attraction of the gingerbread house even if, behind the cherry door, there is a "sound of black rags flapping." (pp. 97-8)

In the longest play [included in "A Theological Position"], "The Kid," the conventions of the Western, often satirized before, are given a scathing beating. Every line spoken, every stage direction, is a cliché …; the Kid is a psychopath programmed to respond only to certain stimuli, particularly Injuns, and the local hero has to be ceremoniously sacrificed. In [the title] play, the "theological position" is that virgin birth is no longer possible and therefore the priest had better have sex with the pregnant maiden; toward the end, only the players' genitals are talking, which should have been funnier, or more profound, or something. Never mind, Coover takes extraordinary risks and deserves forgiveness for his failures.

The remaining two plays are better. Both are monologues. In one ["Love Scene"], a director, perhaps God, urges two actors to show some feeling in their love scene, but they respond only with impassive motions. A scene with intriguing reverberations: perhaps Coover is suggesting that the first attempt to create love failed, or that love cannot respond to the clichés this director uses…. Coover's effect here, as elsewhere, derives in part from the deliberate artificiality of actors…. (pp. 98, 100)

The other monologue, "Rip Awake," may be Coover's "Emperor Jones." Rip Van Winkle toils up his mountain again, half dreading, half looking forward to his next encounter with the little men: "I mean. listen, I don't entirely regret them twenty years." Rip is in bad shape. He can't remember things well, can't sleep now, wonders whether the dwarfish bowlers get their importance from him or he from them. He worries about the Revolution: did it really happen, and if so and he slept through it, does he need his own? Are the "little buggers" in fact real? Anyway, Rip is, as he says, "proceeding back up the mountain to rassel with the spooks in his life." Internal or external, those are real, and that is what Coover writes about so well. (p. 100)