One thing [the sodomy episode in The Public Burning] brings out is how boringly enthralled and confused [Coover] is by sex, like many contemporary American novelists. This fantasy of anal sex is not nearly as good as the immediately preceding episode, a surrealistically transformed version of the execution of Julius and Ethel Rosenberg. The book should have ended here, especially as this is the "public burning" of the title. But Robert Coover evidently has a Mailer-like view of sodomy as something physically and morally dirty, and hence the conviction that to do it or write about it is interestingly outrageous….

The reader's strongest impression of The Public Burning will probably be of a prodigious feat of assimilation and assembly of historical fact, both ephemeral and substantial….

Generally the torrent of allusions has an almost perfervid liveliness, and shows brilliant powers of verbal mimicry. The crassness of the Nixon sodomy episode is counterweighted by the startlingly clever pastiches of brands of discourse which were conspicuous or celebrated in the early 1950s….

The whole novel consists of alternating chapters in the third person and first person, where the "I" is Nixon, and its most challenging interpretive difficulties concern the characterization of their speaker which the Nixon chapters generate….

Because of [Coover's] procedures the Nixon chapters gather a more authoritative feeling than the authorial ones. This effect is striking, especially in post-Watergate days, but it originates in Mr Coover's earlier, less factional fiction. The armature of The Public Burning is the same as that of his first two novels: an American superstition giving rise to its appropriate imaginary apocalypse. Here the superstition is anticommunism. In The Origin of the Brunists it is millennial religion. In The Universal Baseball Association, Inc. J. Henry Waugh Prop. it is baseball. The heroes of both these previous books are manipulators of the apocalypse, but not dislikable. When Eisenhower's vice-president Richard Nixon is treated with the same degree of inwardness and generosity the result is even more disquieting and memorable.