Richard Nixon's inward ruminations in [The Public Burning] offer a view of the then Vice President's adolescence, college experience, early years, and sex life that's wholly engrossing. At one level the constructive imagination illuminates neglected relationships among the facts of a private and public life…. And simultaneously there's a dramatization, at another level, of the processes involved in the creation of a literary character…. But for every page of perception there's a matching page of rant and anti-American cliché, uttered by a fantastic creation named Uncle Sam Slick, a blend of Jove, the Holy Ghost, Davy Crockett, and Foxy Grandpa, who presides over the action of The Public Burning from beginning to end, and speaks a dreadful idiom drawn from the Down Home American Folk Past—shebang, hodag, etc. (There are precedents for this sort of rant in the Coover oeuvre.) Uncle Sam's deeds are as boringly predictable as his talk; because of both, The Public Burning seems overschematic and overblown. (p. 98)
Benjamin DeMott, "Culture Watch," in The Atlantic Monthly (copyright © 1977 by The Atlantic Monthly Company, Boston, Mass.; reprinted with permission), Vol. 240, No. 5, November, 1977, pp. 98-101.∗
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Read the rest of this Criticism with our Coover, Robert 1932–: Critical Essay by Benjamin Demott Access Pass.
