Uncle Sam Takes On the Phantom

By Paul Gray

THE PUBLIC BURNING

by ROBERT COOVER 534 pages. Viking. $12.95.

Author Robert Coover, 45, is not a household name, unless the house happens to be a college dormitory. An on-and-off teacher, Coover has won a campus reputation as an avant-gardist who can do with reality what a magician does with a pack of cards: shuffle the familiar into unexpected patterns. Devotees religiously pass along The Universal Baseball Association, Inc., an eerie tale of a recluse who invents and maintains an eight-team baseball league and the lives of hundreds of players. First editions of his first novel (The Origin of the Brunists) and a collection of short stories (Pricksongs & Descants) are prized by their owners and generally unavailable on the open market.

All this genteel anonymity is about to end. Controversy, if not quality, bids fair to make The Public Burning a major publishing event. An excerpt from the novel that ran last fall in American Review alerted readers to its incendiary subject: the June 19, 1953, execution of Ethel and Julius Rosenberg. In Coover's fiction, the convicted atomic bomb spies are transferred from the death house at Sing Sing to a public stage in Times Square for their execution. Word began circulating that several publishers had considered the manuscript and decided not to risk legal repercussions. The question naturally arose: What in this obstreperous age could be unfit to print?

Viking finally decided to publish it. But perhaps the best thing would have been for each major U.S. publisher to issue a different snippet of the novel. The threat of lawsuits would thus have been spread evenly around the industry--and few readers, forced to put the novel together through separately published installments, would have had the patience or the cash to discover what an overwritten bore The Public Burning really is.

Coover's 534-page opus hangs--and strangles--on a premise that might have sustained a passable college skit. Uncle Sam and the Phantom (i.e., Communism) are engaged in a life-and-death struggle for control of the world. Sam was doing swell at the end of World War II, but it is now 1953, and the Phantom possesses, among other things, mainland China and the atomic bomb. The Rosenbergs, tried and found guilty of helping the enemy get the bomb, must be exorcised as spectacularly as possible so that the light from their electrocution can combat the Phantom's forces of darkness. A character named Richard Nixon, who is Vice President of the U.S., skulks around the periphery of the event, trying to figure out a way to turn it to his personal advantage.

Coover's approach to the Rosenbergs' executions stems from a particularly heavyhanded variety of political satire that flourished in the 1960s: in Paul Krassner's magazine the Realist, for example, and hi Barbara Garson's play MacBird! Political figures, so the paranoia goes, are fair game. It is assumed in this genre that the most scabrous inventions can be brandished publicly and still fall short of the awful truth. Coover handles the rather limited demands of this artless form with ease. Those who are amused by gross fantasy will find much to admire in The Public Burning: Supreme Court Justices slipping and sliding in a pile of elephant dung; an aspirant to the presidency being sodomized by Uncle Sam.

But Coover clearly has more on his mind than a malodorous vendetta. Long stretches of his novel read like a fretful imitation of James Joyce's Ulysses. The author lays out thousands of facts about the early 1950s, in general, and June 17-19, 1953, in particular--from Justice William O. Douglas' last-minute order of a stay of execution to the electrocution itself. He quotes extensively (and with considerable repetition) from the Rosenbergs' trial transcripts and their prison letters, President Eisenhower's speeches, contemporary issues of TIME (which becomes a character mockingly called the "National Poet Laureate"). One chapter is devoted to the contents of the June 19 New York Times. In the next chapter, Vice President Nixon is shown reading the same issue of the Times, and that patch of earth is scorched once again.

In Ulysses, Joyce's catalogue of facts cohered into a unifying myth., Coover's myth requires the diminution of historical figures into pasteboard grotesques; since that much is clear on the novel's opening pages, Coover's torrent of trivia seems like so much padding along the way to a foregone conclusion. He cannot resist parading his data: a nickname is provided for every U.S. President through Truman, and Betty Crocker, like a public address announcer, introduces the 96 U.S. Senators by name at the execution. He also likes to show off his literary ingenuity, as in a long narrative passage told through song lyrics. e.g., "... down to St. James' Infirmary on the trail of the lonesome pine, and back to ole Virginny in the State of Arkansas, that toddlin' town..."

The character named Richard Nixon narrates nearly every other chapter in the novel, where the best and worst in Coover's method coexist with greatest strain. His portrait of an ambitious, insecure and privately obsessed public man is remarkably comprehensive and even moving. If only the character were not named Nixon, all would be well. But Coover allows no distinction between his fiction and the living man; much of the humor depends on a knowledge of the real Nixon's career. As the fictional Nixon's humiliations increase (he is made to appear seminude in front of the throngs at the execution site), what could have been an act of imagination sours into something rather less attractive than vampirism.

The central weakness of The Public Burning can be traced to Coover's attempt to illuminate extremes by making them more extreme. The Rosenbergs' trial and execution were a passionate chapter in an overheated era. Even now, 24 years after their deaths, questions about the couple's guilt or innocence quickly grow heated. Manias stalked the land in the "50s; public and private life had the quality of a Manichaean morality play. Coover knows this, presents all the evidence, and then denies his book the ability to touch hearts or minds instead of nerves. What might have been a long, compassionate look becomes a protracted sneer. Paul Gray

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