Gerald's Party (Coover, Robert) [Paperback]

Robert Coover (Author)

Book Description

Series: Coover, Robert | Publication Date: September 25, 1997

Robert Coover's wicked and surreally comic novel takes place at a chilling, ribald, and absolutely fascinating party. Amid the drunken guests, a woman turns up murdered on the living room floor. Around the corpse, one of several the evening produces, Gerald's party goes on — a chatter of voices, names, faces, overheard gags, rounds of storytelling, and a mounting curve of desire. What Coover has in store for his guests (besides an evening gone mad) is part murder mystery, part British parlor drama, and part sly and dazzling meditation on time, theater, and love.

Editorial Reviews

From Publishers Weekly

The latest work by the author of The Public Burning is a less-than-inspired story. It is set during the course of a single evening, at a party given by a fellow named Gerald. The guests, a curious lot, include a frustrated artist, a young lady determined to discover the joys of sex, a retired couple who are devoted tourists, and a kittenish actress who is found stabbed to death on the living room floor. Before the end of this seemingly interminable evening, three more guests lose their lives and several others are wounded in various ways. As his wife (apparently oblivious to the violence that is soaking her home and guests with blood) serves a steady stream of hors d'oeuvres, Gerald flirts with an attractive woman and recalls his past sexual exploits, especially with the dead actress. Fragments of conversation reveal the guests' views on love, life and theater. Despite occasional flashes of wit, Coover's nightmarish tale amounts to very little. January 102
Copyright 1985 Reed Business Information, Inc. --This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title.

From Library Journal

"We have the past, we have the future," muses Gerald, "but what we never seem to be able to get ahold of is the present." In this major novel, Coover and his narrator mean to invoke the present, and to suggest again the illusory nature of the other states. Our host's evening starts off with the corpse of a promiscuous minor actress, and an anticipated affair for him. But a parodic police inspector, a few more deaths, a blocked toilet, and a director out to make a play of corpse and motley guests keep things moving in improbable directions that dovetail with ideas on theater, time, and love. The secret of Coover's art is amazing juxtapositionof philosophy, scatology, disparate conversations, acts, memories, and metaphorical inventionall powered by the author's enormous verbal energies. Despite a humorous first impression, this isn't an easy book to enter. But it has "the power of play to provoke unexpected insights, . . . excite the heart . . . and perhaps persuade that, after all, there's no time like the present. . . ." Jeff Clark, SUNY Coll. at Old Westbury Lib.
Copyright 1986 Reed Business Information, Inc. --This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title.

Product Details

• Paperback: 320 pages
• Publisher: Grove Press (September 25, 1997)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0802135285
• ISBN-13: 978-0802135285
• Product Dimensions: 8.2 x 5.5 x 0.8 inches
• Shipping Weight: 12.6 ounces (View shipping rates and policies)
• Average Customer Review: 4.7 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (6 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #1,531,253 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

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Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

5 of 5 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars the fall of the West, September 5, 2000

By 

William Chaisson "microfossilboy" (Trumansburg, New York) - See all my reviews
(REAL NAME)   

This review is from: Gerald's Party (Coover, Robert) (Paperback)

Here is a book that is apparently about decadence. All of the characters are in some way connected to the theater community and artifice is therefore their business. There is a great deal of confusion between what is real and what is feigned, imagined, projected or merely confusing. The reader sees everything through the eyes and mind of the eponymous party host. Gerald is a womanizer and a hopeless relativist. For most of the evening he tries to understand and rationalize increasingly outrageous behavior on the part of his party guests and the police who come to investigate the murder of one his party guests.

Yes, this is a murder mystery, or at least it is a parody of one. The number of dead bodies that turn up is never certain, but there at least four. The first body (and the only murder that the police investigate) is that of Ros, a bad actress and a loose woman who is much beloved by everyone at the party, male and female. She is an innocent, a creature of pure impulse and she is beautiful. But as the evening progresses you realize that no one really knows her and that she is perhaps unknowable. At some point Coover suggests that she is the personification of Truth; the police detective reveals that Ros looks exactly like a mysterious woman who he has met only in his dreams and who his therapist has told him symbolizes Truth.

Coover uses people's memories and ritual use of the body of Ros to show that this community (apparently representing all of us) has a very shakey relationship with the Truth. Ros is all things to all people. Some party guests initially keen hysterically over her loss, while others simply shake their heads and pretend to have seen it coming. In the course of the evening, however, she is reduced to a memory and her body to a stage prop and a symbol.

Coover repeatedly juxtaposes the mundane with the horrifying. Policemen eat sandwiches while they are beating recalcitrant guests. Gerald's wife shows off the sewing room to the new neighbors while he is lying on the floor of the same room unable to remove his penis from a teenager that he has just (accidentally) deflowered. In order to get better light on the shot a cameraman asks Gerald to move to one side while he is comforting his best friend, who as been shot in the heart by the police.

This is a hilarious and depressing book. If you don't have a strong stomach for irony or don't think that debauchery is funny, then it probably isn't for you. If you enjoy being told that the bourgeoise are going (have gone) to hell in a handbasket, then read with pleasure.

4 of 4 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Humanity: What a riot!, January 20, 2003

By 

Hovig J. Heghinian (Houston, TX USA) - See all my reviews
(REAL NAME)   

This review is from: Gerald's Party (Coover, Robert) (Paperback)

"Gerald's Party" depicts a single evening in the life of Gerry, a married man who has opened his home to a flood of strange friends, and describes the chaotic string of strange events which occur. The book is written in real time, its 300 pages comprising a single narrative, unbroken by chapters, from the party's beginning to its end. Gerry is the narrator, proceeding from event to event, unable to control anything, and hardly able to understand anything, including himself.

The book is experimental, but does have a plot, concerning a murder-mystery at Gerry's party of strange guests. The story is told in the tradition of surrealists, however, and not a straightforward narrative. Once the reader settles into understanding how the story works, it becomes a joyful romp through mad times.

The theme of the book is very simple: life is a major mess, and it just keeps going. People eat and drink, sleep and sex, live and die, digest and waste, kill and protect, mate monogamously and share polyamorally, control themselves and let themselves go, have children and have fun, grow up and act childish, dirty and clean, dress and undress, lie and speak true, think scientifically and think artistically, fantasize and live pragmatically, search for philosophical meaning and live hedonistically for today. And they never stop! Robert Coover pushes all the buttons in the psyche of the human animal, as if writing a reference manual for an extraterrestrial, telling it: "Here's humanity. Welcome to it!"

This book is experimental and surreal, but arguably more accessible than Beckett, and certainly more earthy and explicit. (This is so Coover can push all your buttons.) It uses an interesting form of dialog occasionally: two or three different conversations interweave their lines, making it a joyful challenge to follow along, and creating interesting intersections at times. There are two dozen characters, all with their own independent dynamic, and Coover mixes them with entertaining effect. Some are consistent, such as the wife, the son, the mother-in-law, and others, who exercise their own unique idiosyncracies steadily throughout the book, like pschological points of reference interweaving with the other characters.

This book is very well done. I cannot praise it highly enough. Coover deserves immense credit for pulling it all off. Once the reader understands the story is meant to be absurd, not literal, it becomes great fun, very vivid, and memorable. Coover is extremely imaginative, and "Gerald's Party" is a fantastic riot.

3 of 3 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars A wonderfully ridiculous metafiction novel., June 5, 1999

By 

[e-mail] (Lawrnece, KS) - See all my reviews

This review is from: Gerald's Party (Coover, Robert) (Paperback)

This was my third Coover novel. I had read "Origin of the Brunists" and "A Night at the Movies" a few years ago. "Gerald's Party" is an account of a party gone wildly out of control in every way possible. The story climaxes with an impropmtu and highly metaphorical theatre production in Gerald's living room, mind you, involving all the (surviving) characters (clothed and unclothed) that summaraizes the whole concept of the book. How many parties have you been to like that?! The dialogue is from people all over the house (in whatever room Gerald is in at the time), all mixed in with, and at the same time as his own conversations. The prose gets hazier as the night goes on and the multiple-conversation thing does too but it's all in the name of an accurate party aesthetic. It's difficult to latch onto at first but well worth it. Up there with Barth's "Lost in the Funhouse" as an important and tricky but really fun fiction work about fiction. Sit back and enjoy it like I did, but don't get fooled. Sweet vermouth on the rocks is never a good idea. I don't care who's drinking it or what they look like.