The Adventures of Lucky Pierre: Directors' Cut [Hardcover]

Robert Coover (Author)

Book Description

Publication Date: October 2002

A virtuosic performance by one of "our most venturesome metafictional fabulists" (The New York Times Book Review), The Adventures of Lucky Pierre is the culmination of a project Coover has been working on for more than a quarter of a century. It is a tour de force that confirms why Coover is one of our preeminent writers. The place is Cinecity, the frozen meta-city where Lucky Pierre plies his trade. Part porn star, part clown, Pierre is quite literally defined by his films. Following the city motto -- Pro bono pubis -- each of Pierre's nine muse-directors creates her own sexual galaxy with Pierre the star of her show. Pierre becomes a naive castaway, a naughty little boy, a submissive slave, a lovestruck hubby, a sexual outlaw, a dirty cartoon, a sex machine, and more. But what will happen when the film ends? A sparkling meditation on how both sex and stories compel and invent us -- in both magical and violent ways -- The Adventures of Lucky Pierre is a masterpiece from one of America's best writers. "Of all the postmodernist writers, Robert Coover is probably the funniest and most malicious." -- Michiko Kakutani, The New York Times "The supreme chronicler of the unreality of American life." -- Carey Harrison, San Francisco Chronicle "Coover couldn't write a dull note to the milkman." -- John Schulian, Los Angeles Times Book Review

Editorial Reviews

From Publishers Weekly

Film has long been one of Coover's favorite tropes, used brilliantly in the short story collection A Night at the Movies (1987). His new novel returns to the medium, this time endlessly looping through triple-X porn flicks. Protagonist Lucky Pierre is a porn star buffoon who wanders about Cinecity-the capital of Coover's fictional land-with his penis sticking out of his pants. Cinecity is a porno dystopia where every encounter between man and woman, or for that matter man and animal, or woman and vegetable, is destined to end in sex. The nine "reels" of the novel are dominated by nine different women who are stars, directors and muses. Lucky encounters Cinecity's anti-celebrity guerrilla activists, the Extars, led by Carlotta; gets married in a group orgy to Connie; and is victimized by Cinecity's sadistic mayor, Cora. He suspects that having his penis frozen, falling down an elevator shaft and nearly drowning aren't just filmset accidents, but are actually scripted into an overall film-one in which he is set up as the fall guy. His strategy is to try to find a way out of the film, but in the logic of the novel Lucky himself is merely the embodiment of a film's trajectory, and escape is impossible. The result is a carnival of stasis and penis jokes that shows Coover at his most precious. Some passages are marvels of descriptive prose-fierce, vigorous and pungent-but the endless scenes of torture and smutty closeups are tedious and curiously spiritless, and Coover says little about celluloid culture and movie narratives that he hasn't said elsewhere with more generosity and exuberance.
Copyright 2002 Reed Business Information, Inc.

From Library Journal

Coover, winner of a Lannan Literary Award in Fiction in 2000 and author of Spanking the Maid and Ghost Town, returns with this metafictional romp through a fantastic city where art is the highest form of reality. The title character appears in nine movies whose female directors cast him in diverse sexual roles running the gamut from the creative to the perverse. What will happen when the last reel finishes? Only die-hard Coover fans will tolerate the preponderance of filler to reach the suspenseful conclusion. A meditation on truth and a narrative in the high postmodern style, this book has been done better before by authors such as Coover himself. It is difficult to recommend it for any but the largest collections or those that maintain exhaustive holdings in contemporary fiction. Philip Santo, Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York
Copyright 2002 Reed Business Information, Inc.

See all Editorial Reviews

Product Details

• Hardcover: 304 pages
• Publisher: Grove Press; 1 edition (October 2002)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0802117244
• ISBN-13: 978-0802117243
• Product Dimensions: 8.6 x 5.8 x 1.4 inches
• Shipping Weight: 1.3 pounds
• Average Customer Review: 5.0 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (1 customer review)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #1,853,469 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

4 of 8 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Perre gets lucky and nine again..., August 24, 2004

By 

Joao Leao "free-lance cosmologist" (Cambridge, Mass., United States) - See all my reviews
(REAL NAME)   

This review is from: The Adventures of Lucky Pierre: Directors' Cut (Hardcover)

Think of the infinite cycle of revenge initiated by Fellini's 8 and a half. Yes, the dream sequence! No, not the first one, the other later on when he is living in perfect harmony with all the 8 maybe 9 women of his dreams... Broadway still sings about it! Peter Greenway tried to re-movie it HIS way... Coover's way WAY outdoes them all proving that he is firmly transmodern, transcinematic, pantronic, pornoclastic, iconomorphic! Check the references. Go to imdb.com . Verify that Coover found Lucky Pierre in <a href="http://www.imdb.com/name/nm0507267/bio">Herschell Gordon Lewis</a> 1961 forgotten naive exploit of the same name which no one cared to see or comment on. Brought Pierre out of retirement to protagonize as only he could, the brunt of feminist deconstructive romp in this newly meta-Tarrantinized nitemare of romp and stomp, this de-Ramboesque purge so telling of the times.
It is Felini lionised! It is Mastroiani finally "Slavroinized"! It is the all-consumming, selfcom-summing, sum total of all male fears penned with the supreme mastery of the pen-is-my-pained-penis only Coover commands. This is a brilliant work, in more ways than anyone can find or fathom. A slap o mastery that one can only hope, has the infinity of sequels it deserves and engenders in the mind! If you have not read it yet and you are not reading it now, what the hell are you waiting for?