[In the following review of Briar Rose, Upchurch praises the novel, though notes that Coover's “manneristic flourishes and acrobatic syntax” will make the work inaccessible to some readers.]

It's a truism that certain authors write their books with future film options in mind. With this sly new retelling of the Sleeping Beauty story, however, Robert Coover opens up another, quintessentially 1990s possibility for media rights. His Briar Rose seems custom-designed to make a nifty computer game.

This shouldn't come as a complete surprise. Coover (The Public Burning, Gerald's Party) teaches electronic and experimental fiction at Brown University, and of all our literary novelists, he has been the most vocal in championing hypertext fiction: computer texts in which readers, clicking away at their mouses (mice?), choose their own paths through imaginary worlds.

The story mechanics of this elegant, intricate, enigmatic novella will certainly be familiar to anyone who has dabbled in “Myst” or tried to track down reliable reference material on the Internet—for Briar Rose consists of almost nothing but false starts, wrong turns, spiral staircases, a “door that is not a door” and other endlessly mutable narrative pathways that frustrate its beleaguered heroes. Both the castle-bound princess, waiting to be woken from her hundred-years sleep, and the prince, tangled in a briar thicket while trying to reach her, inhabit a shape-shifting dream in which everything has a “double life.” Controlling this dream—or, at least, idly toying with it—is the “old crone, hideously ugly and vaguely threatening” who put Rose and the castle under a spell in the first place.

Under this crone's influence, Rose's dreams of rescue have a nasty habit of going off-track. One recurring nightmare is that her rescuer is already married, with a wife at home who is “as you can imagine, a very unhappy lady.” In other versions, Rose is woken by the wrong man (or men), kissed by a toad and turned into one herself (“But that's terrible!” she protests), or roused not by a kiss but by someone sinking his teeth into her throat (oops—wrong story!). As for the prince, his vivid imaginings of the princess he will rescue are equally susceptible to transformation. Though he dreams of making his name with his act of heroism, deep down he suspects he has met his match and will soon die, as have all his predecessors who tried to reach the castle, their bones now “rattling in the brambles down below.”

Though it picks up—after a fashion—where John's Wife, Coover's uproarious previous novel, left off (John and his nameless wife were the “prince” and “princess” of their scandal-ridden Midwestern town), Briar Rose is less raucous than most of Coover's fiction. True, it offers plenty of antic humor. Yet the book is predominantly meditative in tone, and the subjects it ponders—unsustainable romance, thwarted ambition, mortality—have as much to do with the workaday world as any fairy-tale realm. The blunders, misgivings and regrets of prince and princess alike reveal disparities between life as it is imagined and life as it is lived, and there's an urgency to these revelations that renders Coover's story-scrambling mischief strangely poignant. The book is a might-have-been and never-will-be fantasia that ends up striking close to home, despite its Brothers Grimm furnishings.

That said, Coover's prose, with its manneristic flourishes and acrobatic syntax, won't be to everyone's liking. Briar Rose is a short but challenging read, demanding and rewarding close attention. Those who navigate it carefully will enter a world in which there are always surprises behind the next door or up that darkened staircase, and even if its structure and imagery suggest an elaborate game in which the reader feels invited to savor myriad alternatives to the narrative sequence at hand, Coover's control over this non-linear, multiple-choice world is crucial. Enthusiastic readers may well be tempted to option any hypertext rights up for sale—but they should also be happy to leave all “what-happens-next?” decisions in the hands of a master, now at the height of his powers.