From planes, cars, trains, ships, and buses, they debouch upon the city in a breathless rush and scatter, squealing in awe and umbrage, clicking cameras, streaming through the narrow streets in their patterned sportshirts and J.C. Penney dresses like blind and anxious ants, hot on the trail of the unknown. There are bright clusters of them at Rockefeller Plaza, Greenwich Village, Fifth Avenue, crawling all over each other, going where the others go, seeing what the others see. The Battery. The United Nations. The Waldorf-Astoria. Scurrying about, chasing temptations, ogling heights, asking directions, bumping into each other, dropping parcels, taking bus tours, panicking at intersections, getting lost. Some find themselves on the subway while looking for the men's room. Some try to leap off the Empire State Building or photograph the burlesque shows, others get off at the wrong stop on the Third Avenue El and miss everything. They consume staggering quantities of egg rolls, shish kebab, knishes, French doughnuts, Hungarian goulash, oyster stew, and pizza pie, lick millions of postage stamps, trample hotel carpets to shreds, and wrinkle, stain, and burn holes in enough sheets to tent the nation. They get aroused by streetwalkers, maligned by cabdrivers, lectured in Union Square, sunburned at Coney Island, and raped in Central Park.
-pg. 165-6
This book begins after Supreme Court Justice William O Douglas granted the atom spies Julius and Ethel Rosenberg a stay of execution and ends three days later when they are put to death by electrocution. Although the events are real, Coover deviates wildly from the script of history, and in perhaps the most inspired decision of the book, allows then-Vice President Richard M. Nixon to narrate over half of the action, who, as a character, turns out to be a sweating, bumbling, fumbling, suspicious, paranoid, mess of a man, although ingeniously presented so as to provide the only real bit of pathos in the entire farce. Coover uses some funny gimmicks, the most prominent of which is that the idea of Uncle Sam is transformed into a flesh-and-blood superhero, kicking ass in Korea, fighting the Phantom, his ubiquitous Commie nemesis, all over the world, keeping the light of America alive at home, and generally directing the energies and excesses of the grandeur that is America towards life, liberty and the pursuit of un-American activities. A few of the others he shoehorns in right from the get-go are Time Magazine as the young Poet Laureate, the New York Times as some monument to which you make a pilgrimage, and, as above, the chaos and crass consumption that epitomizes Times Square serving as a totem for all that is hallowed in this America of Coover's imagination.
But is it so richly imagined? Is it, as it were, inspired? To say so would be to deny the ugliness of a reflection, to blame a mirror for its accuracy rather than because of its warp and wobble. For all the inventiveness thrown in, for every ridiculous exaggeration, there is an element of truth that clings and leaves a stink, like shit stuck on your shoe, and as the shit accrues, it becomes incredibly difficult not to be disturbed by this vision of America, by a vision of America that, while absurd, rings true.
The prose is both maddening and delightful; Coover has an ear for every carnival barker's braying voice, every Congressman's whinging cavil, every man on the street's pedestrian petulance, and he's got the poetry of the prurient press down pat. The most remarkable accretions of sheer language come spilling out of Uncle Sam's mouth, mashing all pioneers' ho-hum hokum platitudes, jingoism's jangly jargon, liberty's lies, democracy's delusions, and Coover lets it all hang out with respect to literary device. Snatches of plays, opera, and poetry infiltrate the text like spies, and language is--becomes--like some cold war, with beauty on the one side and ugliness on the other, seething in some not-truce because of mutually assured destruction, and at the center of it all is Tricky Dick's self-centered whining voice, plotting, doubting, going on mock offensives, falling back to lick old wounds, rallying to stand at center stage to declare: All life, all of it, is but a play within a play. And like any good American, he's convinced he's the main character.
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