SOURCE: "Robert Coover and the Magic of Fiction Making," in his The Metafictional Muse: The Works of Robert Coover, Donald Barthelme, and William H. Gass, University of Pittsburgh Press, 1982, pp. 25-97.

McCaffery is an American educator and critic. In the following excerpt, originally published in slightly different form in 1979, he examines Coover's portrayal of the human tendency to manufacture myths in The Origin of the Brunists and The Public Burning.

Although flawed in certain respects, Robert Coover's first novel, The Origin of the Brunists, presents a clear, fairly comprehensive view of his metafictional impulses. Using the founding of the Christian religion as its primary analogue, The Brunists seeks to examine the hold which the fictions of religion and history maintain over men. Based in part on some actual experiences Coover had as a youngster in southern Illinois, the plot of the book is built around a mining disaster...