SOURCE: McLaughlin, Robert L. Review of John's Wife, by Robert Coover. Review of Contemporary Fiction 16, no. 3 (fall 1996): 183–84.

In the following review, McLaughlin praises John's Wife, calling the novel “funny, moving, shocking, revealing, thought-provoking.”

Over a thirty-year career, Robert Coover has given us ground-breaking fiction that, while making us laugh, cuts to the heart of the stories that define our world and to the terrible truths about storytelling itself. John's Wife, his brilliant new novel, is his thirtieth anniversary present to his readers. In it, Coover weaves his various characters' voices and stories into complex structures that create, then unmake, then re-create the world of contemporary America.

The novel is set in a small town, probably in the Midwest and probably near the present time (these contexts are presented with a fairy-tale-like ambiguity). It is narrated from the points of view of dozens of the town's inhabitants in a...