"The Cat in the Hat for President": that was the title of this satire [A Political Fable] when first published in 1968 (in the literary magazine New American Review)—and that's the single, inspired, ferocious joke (dated not one whit) that keeps most of these 88 miniature pages roaring along…. [The] Convention turns into a circus: first a catchy slogan starts appearing everywhere ("Let's make the White House a Cat House"); next, an irresistible campaign song fills the air ("So go to bat for the Cat in the Hat! / He's the Cat who knows where it's at! / With Tricks and Voom and Things like that!"); then funny hats, gorgeous cheerleaders, cute gags—and finally the arrival of the Cat himself, who pulls Seuss-like stunts, wreaks cartoon havoc, wows the crowd, and wins the nomination on the first ballot…. But the Cat's antics … eventually get out of hand … and he's skinned alive by an angry mob. True, Coover pushes this finale into the sort of excess and literalism that so thoroughly undermined The Public Burning: "While the Cat burned, the throng fucked in a great conglobation of races, sexes, ages, and convictions; it was the Great American Dream in oily actuality …" But otherwise the sheer awful exuberance of the central absurdity here—which somehow, paradoxically, tempers Coover's naked loathing with Seuss' more good-natured mania—works to perfection: a devastating, across-the-board swipe at presidential imagery and campaign hype, perhaps even righter for Election '80 than it was for the more issue-centered nightmares of '68. (pp. 724-25)
A review of "A Political Fable," in Kirkus Reviews, Vol. XLVIII, No. 11, June 1, 1980, pp. 724-25.
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