SOURCE: Brzezinski, Steve. Review of John's Wife, by Robert Coover. Antioch Review 54, no. 3 (summer 1996): 364–65.

In the following review, Brzezinski offers a positive assessment of John's Wife.

Coover, one of America's most celebrated novelists and the leading practitioner of postmodernist fiction, weighs in with a dense, hallucinatory meditation on collective yearnings and the intrusion of the fantastic into everyday life. The novel is a darkly comic dissection of the interior life of a “quiet prairie town.” Boasting a cast of some 50 major characters, with dizzying shifts of perspective and narration, the book circles endlessly around common events seen from different vantage points. It is the achievement of this difficult and demanding work that the impact on the reader is ultimately illumination rather than exhaustion. Coover's disturbing probings into the psyches of his characters and his ability to commingle private fantasies with public events so merge individual and group perspectives...