SOURCE: Kearns, George. “Fiction: In History and Out.” Hudson Review 44, no. 3 (autumn 1991): 495–96.

In the following excerpt, Kearns offers a negative assessment of Pinocchio in Venice.

Would there were some text-specific Lethe-water one could swallow after reading Robert Coover's Pinocchio in Venice, which leaves me feeling soiled, defiled, gross. I knew I should have stopped, but, authentic sinner, I went on of my own free will. That Coover is supremely clever has long been established; he has gathered more prizes, grants and fellowships than a fetish has nails and feathers. The whole dictionary and a set of reference books are right there in his fingers, available to word-processing through a gift for sinister pastiche. He sprinkles rhinestones and sequins over a midden, not to improve the midden but to lure victims. For if there's a purpose to the over-ripe sophistication that lends styles of Coover's scatology of disillusion, it...