In ”Gerald`s Party,” Robert Coover`s eighth book of fiction and fourth or fifth (do novellas count?) novel, people party hearty. They ain`t leaving till they`re heaving, sexually sated, or carted out dead on a stretcher. They may be just middle-class middle-aged white folks, but, hey, they are pumped. So pumped, in fact, that, as the novel`s first sentence announces: ”None of us noticed the body at first.”
The thoroughly voluptuous but very dead body belongs to one Ros, Gerald`s friend Roger`s amorous young actress wife. She`s been stabbed several times in the chest, her lifeblood ”still fountaining from a hole between her breasts, soaking her silvery frock, puddling,” Gerald notices, ”the carpet.” In the headlong rush to examine the body, show grief, find some clues, or identify persons with motives, most of the partygoers soon manage to bespatter themselves with Ros` warm gore. It also turns out that almost everyone there has had access to possible murder weapons. Worse than that, it is further revealed that a few of the women and most of the men in attendance (Gerald is foremost among them) have had secret liaisons with Ros.
Imagine the confusion this causes! Imagine the havoc a few dozen drunken, guilt-ridden, gore-spattered partygoers can wreak on poor Gerald`s living room! Imagine Gerald`s mother-in-law`s consternation as she tries to get Gerald`s son Mark into bed and asleep in the midst of all this! Just imagine.
Because making us reckon with things that we really can`t bear to imagine is Coover`s intention exactly. It is not bad enough that Roger runs rampant with anguish and tears up the living room; when the police arrive to investigate, the only way they`re able to restrain him is by killing him, too. And this is one of the less shocking turns of event, Ros` murder being merely the intitial Big Bang that generates a particulate universe of hilarious worst-case scenarios.
Coover`s presentation, however, stays deadpan and matter-of-fact. Gerald`s wife continues to serve up a lavish assortment of fondues and chip dips and cold cuts. Guests discuss motives or movies (or paintings or plays)
or make out in various bedrooms. Gerald keeps on scurrying back to the kitchen to restock the fridge, ”pulling the cold beers forward, packing the warm cans in at the back.” The party, at all costs, goes on. Which is, of course, life in the West during wartime. Which is, of course, Coover`s main point.
Sentence by sentence, from first page to last, what goes on at this party is a raunchy, sacrilegious, and mordantly witty depiction of our principal turn-of-the-millenium rite: the wild, blithe denial of death–Ros`, everyone else`s, and ours. All this is rendered in a supple recombinant prose that conveys the entropic audio-visual simultaneity of all mortal parties. Early on, as Gerald kneels over the body, he sees and hears: ” `Wh-who…?` It was the question, I knew, that had been quietly worming through us all. Patrick took a nervous puff on the cigarette held like a dart between the tips of his fingers, watching Mavis now over Anatole`s shoulder. Dolph came in with a can of beer in his hand and popped it open . . . Mavis` plump white arms hung limply at her sides, palms out. She lifted her head slowly and we waited for her question. I felt people crowding up behind me like mustered troops. Or a theatrical chorus. Somebody was chewing potato chips in my ear. Vic stood up. `Who–?` ”
One clue to this question has to do with the fact that Ros, to help Roger make it through law school, once took a job as a nude model for a drawing class in a men`s prison. Exclamation point. And what about the switch-blade Naomi discovers in Tania`s upended shoulder bag? Ditto. And then there`s the ice pick that Gerald has stashed in the hamper beneath all the maculate underwear. Yvonne, Woody`s wife, sums up our quandary as follows: ” `My God!` she gasped as the others yukked it up. `I`ve . . . I`ve never been to a party like this before.` ”
Three hundred pages and thousands of clues later on, an ever more radical uncertainty has asserted itself with a vengeance. And by now Gerald`s party, having gotten its fourth or fifth wind, has taken on a life of its own: ”The new arrivals were spreading recklessly through the house, as though the place itself were hemorrhaging. `Please,` I said, but no one was listening, they were all (`Ha ha, we give up, Moose!`) hooting and laughing. `My oh my, look what`s not in that nightie!` `Hey, I`m looking for Serena!` `Is that rhubarb pie?` `She ain`t here, Ralphie!` `Vot`s hoo-bob?` asked Olga, grinning stupidly and pushing the nightie down past her navel: at the back, it climbed halfway to her shoulders.” And Ros, for her part, has long since been forgotten.
In spite of its marked similarities to all Coover`s earlier novels,
”Gerald`s Party” is most reminiscent of his startling 1968 story ”The Babysitter,” wherein an amalgam of sexually charged possibilities (most of them mutually exclusive) were imagined by the various characters. As soon as we begin to get a fix on them, events in that story started to leap-frog and warp, so that what had begun as more or less innocent daydreaming somehow accelerated into actual murder and mayhem. So too in this novel. Throughout Coover`s fiction, in fact, what ”really” has happened is never as interesting as what the exposed dreamwork of our scared and concupiscent reveries tells us about how our minds really work.
Although Coover`s vision of our world is frankly erotic and everywhere threatened by violence, his synthesis of the two is robustly and pointedly comic, with cross-fire echoes of Chaucer and Faulkner (and Coover) as well as of Swift, Sterne and Sade. It`s a wicked, delicious admixture. Readers too used to the sanitary Great Communicator prose now in favor will be made more than a little bit nervous by Coover`s exuberant use of American English, not to mention his mockingly shocking tight close-ups on the naked and hairy details of our culture. This is not a non-problem. Because it is only by exposing ourselves to the pulsed teeming language of the libidinous imagination that we can perhaps get a make on our threatened and threatening decadence, and a whole lot of readers these days would much rather deny it.
So. Tropophobics beware! This novel`s warped logic posits the mind of its reader as a kind of muscular and miraculous sixth-sense organ, polymorphously perverse and more than a little intelligent, to which Coover proceeds to administer for l50,000 odd words one dexterous, exotic message. It doesn`t actually say so, of course, on the dustjacket, but still. Just imagine.
