[In the following excerpt, Kearns offers a negative assessment of Pinocchio in Venice.]

Would there were some text-specific Lethe-water one could swallow after reading Robert Coover's Pinocchio in Venice, which leaves me feeling soiled, defiled, gross. I knew I should have stopped, but, authentic sinner, I went on of my own free will. That Coover is supremely clever has long been established; he has gathered more prizes, grants and fellowships than a fetish has nails and feathers. The whole dictionary and a set of reference books are right there in his fingers, available to word-processing through a gift for sinister pastiche. He sprinkles rhinestones and sequins over a midden, not to improve the midden but to lure victims. For if there's a purpose to the over-ripe sophistication that lends styles of Coover's scatology of disillusion, it would seem to be that of defecating on anything the human race has ever found pleasant or believed in. I mean this literally, as I'll explain in a moment.

Briefly, the post-modernized story goes like this: At the end of Carlo Collodi's 1880 children's classic, itself quite nasty, our little puppet turned into a “real boy.” Who, in Coover, grew up to a brief career in Hollywood. (To read Collodi is to appreciate Walt Disney's gift for cosmetic surgery.) Then he became Professor Pinenut, an American academic with humanist pretensions sufficient for two Nobel Prizes. Now he's creaking professor emeritus returned to Italy, to Venice, to complete an autobiographical work and to search for the only mother-figure he ever knew, Collodi's blue-haired Fairy. In Coover's phantasmagoric Venice of masks, harlequins and carnival, he is humiliated, battered and besmirched in every way a Satanic author can devise, apparently as punishment for having written humanist works. Fragments of Collodi's tale pop up in transformations. The blue-haired Fairy is a coarse slut of an American co-ed from the fifties. (In this most misogynist of contemporary texts, by the way, there are no un-be-slutted females or feminine images.) Pinocchio once turned into a donkey, so the professor is baked into a donkey-shaped pizza, and after having had a hole bored in his rear with an apple corer (yes!), is given a ricotta-filled cannoni for a tail.

I kept reading this book because hypnotized, I couldn't believe my eyes, by Coover's fascination with shit, ass-holes, and anything metonymically associated with the same: enemas; arse pimples (pun on Art Principles); whoopee cushions; chamber pots; turds as “saints' relics” (and vice versa); a “peach of an ash”; the fouling of clothes; merdaio; cacca; buggering; hemorrhoids; diapers on the Ducal Palace, and, not in my dictionary, rectum snakes. This is a mere elegant sampling: mostly it's just our demotic pals like “shit” and “ass-hole.” I stopped counting at about two hundred, but the count must go over a thousand, for there are few pages free of the thematic, and some that let go, as it were, half a dozen. This goes elsewhere than art. Someone—let me be polite and invoke our old companion, the “implied author”—someone has a problem. Genitals fare badly, too, in this text, especially when they mingle with philosophy in Duns Scrotum (sic) and Immaculate Kunt (sick). Anything sacred must be made vile, insistently, obsessively; so we have a plenitude of things (I can't bring myself to type out the worst) such as the Fourteen Urinals of the Cross, a Bellini madonna with a penis drawn in her mouth, a Madonna of the Organs “reaching into the scarlet folds of her glistening vagina with both hands and pulling out her ovaries which she proceeds to flick on their fallopian strings at the Count's shaft like little pink yo-yos.” No, no, Coover is only superficially post-modern, if suffering from a style that might be firmed up by a bit of Kaopectate. His true genres, sturdy, unchallenged, charmless as they ever were, include the locker-room story and the crudely-drawn dirty comics we had as kids about the sexual exploits and remarkable physicalities of Orphan Annie and Dick Tracy. Let us turn to something better.