[In the following review, Quinn praises the reissued edition of The Public Burning and offers a positive assessment of Ghost Town.]

Imagine a re-worked Mount Rushmore, sculpted in dynamite. Looming large in the Dakota sunlight are the conjoined forms of monumentalized media-age presidents: JFK, Ronald Reagan and Bill Clinton flank a frowning Richard Nixon, the shadow at five o'clock spilling off his granite chin into the valley below through which a lone cowboy rides. Such a landscape, of history and mediated myth—and the increasingly uncertain territory between—is conjured up when one moves from Robert Coover's reissued magnum opus, The Public Burning, through his subsequent work, arriving finally at the bleached Old West of his latest novel, Ghost Town.

As the century itself rides into the sunset, a great deal of critical received wisdom is due for revision; not least the caricature of the kind of postmodern writing, exemplified by Coover's generation and reaching its height in the 1970s, as narcissistic, lost in a hall of mirrors, and self-defeatingly concerned with formal games. In fact, much of this writing is more socially and politically engaged than the realist writing which finds it wanting. This is most tellingly illustrated in a remarkable sequence of encyclopaedic works, published in close succession; Thomas Pynchon's Gravity's Rainbow (1973) with its military-industrial complexity, William Gaddis's JR (1976), whose multi-voiced capitalist critique can be read as an elaborate illustration of the way “money talks”; and Coover's The Public Burning (1977), with its coruscating satire, form a kind of unofficial trilogy, a subterranean history of the century, intent on identifying and unravelling the ideologies that bind us.

The Public Burning, ostensibly an account of the trial and punishment in 1953 of the “atom spies,” Julius and Ethel Rosenberg (their execution, in an inspired piece of alternative history, is re-located to the neon altar of Times Square), is the least known and understood of these works. (The Rosenberg story has been tackled elsewhere in fiction, by E. L. Doctorow in The Book of Daniel, which is a fine, subtle novel, but too guarded to deal with the grotesqueries of the period, “the whole panorama of the event,” as deftly as Coover.) The principle reason for the novel's neglect is its own subterranean history. The main character and dominant narrator of the novel is Richard Nixon—Vice-President in 1953. When the publishers realized the inflammatory nature of Coover's portrayal (which includes Nixon's thwarted wooing of Ethel Rosenberg—an in appropriate ardour of Richard III proportions—and his sodomization by a personified and priapic Uncle Sam), their publish-and-be-damned credo withered, before the prospect of Tricky Dicky in his post-Watergate litigious state. The atmosphere of acrimony and suspicion was such that one imagines Coover's meetings with agents and lawyers were conducted in underground car-parks, down tapped telephones, on park benches. Eventually the book was sneaked out, and, in spite of nonexistent publicity, gained acclaim and sold well. It was then swiftly removed from the shelves lest it come to Nixon's attention. Now, finally, more than twenty years after the original publication, The Public Burning, one of the great books in a great decade of American writing, is available in a new edition, complete with a stylish and informative introduction by William H. Gass.

Paradoxically, one of the things that makes the book so historically acute is its focus on form: “form, form, that's what it always comes down to! In statesmanship get the formalities right, never mind the moralities”—as Nixon says at one point, and the book is full of official forms, rhetoric, ceremonies (the execution in a mocked up Sing Sing is “imagineered” by a committee including Cecil B. DeMille and Walt Disney, and preceded by a satyr play performed by the Marx Brothers). Nixon's awareness of the performative nature of politics is mirrored by the stagestruck Ethel's childhood hankering after a Broadway career. Informing everything else in the novel is the Cold War theatre; aware of the crude binary logics of these scenarios, Coover gives us Uncle Sam as a mutating huckster-peddler, the embodiment of American values and ever-ready to be incarnated in subsequent Presidents. His nemesis is The Phantom a comic book spectre of Communism haunting the globe. Against this Manichaean allegory, Coover pits a Menippean satire replete with brimming carnivalesque and answering complexity.

The Public Burning is, above all, a profound meditation on mediation, and, beyond the slapstick and satire, sometimes manages to push this preoccupation towards a near-tragic register. This is seen when one of the Rosenberg's children watches news of his parents' impending execution filtered through a televised baseball game, his sense of value and perspective blurred somewhere between channels; or when Nixon displays a rare moment of sympathy in trying to imagine “the mysterious ghetto” where the Rosenbergs were born, only to recoil in realization that his idea of the Lower East Side is hopelessly imbricated with popular culture—“the invention of Warner Brothers … probably those skylines of my mind may have been painted a few miles away in a Hollywood studio.”

The truth, then, lies somewhere beyond the forms that we cannot escape from; even the compensations of the truly tragic are denied us, given all the noisy intermediaries between heath and storm. Certainly, the traditional organs of information are not the places to look for truth. Here, Time magazine is metamorphosed into a propagandistic “National Poet Laureate,” and the New York Times contains “no breakaway wildness, no terrible conjurations, just the easy knell of names in mild parade.” The excess and paranoia of the era that spawned these events, must be approached by more supple forms, like the novel itself with its range of styles. In particular, Coover perfects a sentence structure fit for the sheer speed of the times, swift as a media feeding frenzy. This is most evident in the newsreel style sections in which a typical sentence is comprised of clusters of clauses, greased by ellipses, listing onwards toward the execution hour.

The Public Burning deforms a variety of forms, demystifies many an American mythology, and unpicks a variety of ideologies that can be tracked through Coover's subsequent work. Nixon remained an obsession, and resurfaced, transposed from log cabin to grid-iron, as the American Footballer in Whatever Happened to Gloomy Gus of the Chicago Bears? (1987). The beautifully realized scene in The Public Burning where Nixon approaches Sing Sing, towering like an impregnable fortress, apparently destined to rescue Ethel, his damsel in distress, is echoed in Coover's many pioneering deconstructions of folklore and fairy tale (Coover is acutely aware that the roots of the stories that govern us are ancient and deep): most recently in Briar Rose (1996), where the meeting of prince and sleeping beauty is constantly and hilariously deferred. The idea of a public burning takes on another sense in the masterly John's Wife (1996) in which a climatic conflagration coincides with the inferno of civic values in the small town over which John presides, and where, as the title suggests, the only real relation is the possessive.

Coover's delightful new novel Ghost Town explores one of the main ideologemes mapped in The Public Burning—where High Noon is a constant allusion, where Eisenhower grows up in the town where Wild Bill Hickock was sheriff, and where Nixon feels like a bad guy in a western. While the earlier novel is all controlled anger, however, the later one is cunningly good-humoured horseplay. Coover takes his lone cowboy and subjects him to virtually every behavioural variant ever enacted in dime novel or B-movie (or even that sprightly sub-genre, the postmodern western—one senses, the ghostly presence of Ed Dorn's Gunslinger and Richard Brautigan's The Hawkline Monster, for example). He is, variously, a sheriff, an outlaw, and even, in one very funny episode, an Indian changeling forced to undergo an initiation ceremony which is as involved as it is excruciating. Yet, as always with Coover, these shenanigans still have something to tell us about the arbitrary nature of all rule-based games, be they anthropological ritual, baseball or literature. In this spirit, Coover sometimes reads like Vladimir Propp let loose on Zane Grey and the notion of manifest destiny. At the heart of the story is The Kid's sensual struggle between the saloon chanteuse and the town school marm; however, this being a ghost town, and peculiarly accommodating to the unconscious, the two are increasingly allowed to blur in a bewitching play of desire.

A repeated phrase in this text, and in much of Coover's recent work, is “One of the things that happened was.” He is always keeping alternatives in mind. Similarly, at another point, we get: “He might have been a hired gun or a scout, or he might have been one of the pioneers, it's not clear.” The refusal to deny us other options, the determination to keep various forking paths in sight and on the trail is not some lazy softening of Jamesian solidity of specification, but, rather, an honorable attempt to be truer to the nature of reading and desire—an attempt Coover has spent recent years trying to further, using the new technology of hypertext. Texts like Briar Rose and Ghost Town often read like analogue hypertext; more importantly they can be seen in light of a literary career dedicated to combating reductive and linear thought, to subverting the inexorable logic that sends knight to princess, cowboy to sunset, or the Rosenbergs to the electric chair. That Coover can examine our entrapment by forms through intense formalism is a considerable achievement. If Times Square is the popular place to greet the new millennium, reading The Public Burning is a chastening and exhilarating way to reflect on the current one.