Customer Reviews

Noir: A Novel

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To borrow the second person voice ("you") that controls the narrative of Robert Coover's new novel, "Noir", let it be noted at the outset that you fall within one of three groups.

1 - You are a Coover aficionado and have read most or all of his output to date. You will buy or borrow the newly released "Noir" and read its slim 192 pages in a feverish swoon, critics be damned. If, at some point, you find yourself reading reviews of "Noir" (even, Lord help you, these amateur ones on Amazon) it's because you've finished the book and want to relive the experience or compare your reaction to others. Or:

2 - You have read one or two Coover books (maybe as part of a post-modern lit course) and want to catch up with what the 78-year-old author is doing nowadays. Is he still in the game, you wonder? The news is positive. You will find the pages of "Noir" chock full of Coover's signature mordant wit and claustrophobic worldview. Years ago NY Times book critic Michiko Kakutani observed: "Of all the post-modernist writers, Robert Coover is probably the funniest and most malicious." So, yes, you'll find "Noir" fitfully laugh-inducing -- especially if you're in the mood for a relentless, demented, hallucinogenic parody of crime fiction. If at its end you are ambivalent about the book, well, that is not uncommon with Coover. Upon closing the book you may place a hand on your belly and think to yourself, that was not so much a satisfying meal as a bitter entrée. More likely you will be so delighted by its denouement, which incorporates street philosophy, word play, and all-around cleverness, that you will forgive and forget having been dragged through some slow sections. Or:

3 - Coover is entirely new to you. If so, you are wondering how do you get a good sense of what "Noir" will mean to you as a reading experience? You're finding most reviews of the book are frustratingly un-useful to the novice reader. (There seems to be a jargon-loving Coover clique that luxuriates in the cryptic.) Well, you might consider first checking out a short interview in which Coover himself explains the style and themes of "Noir". This is available online (use these three words in Google search: Coover bookslut interview). Consider also spending a few minutes watching Coover in action, as he reads an early scene (and arguably the best pages) from "Noir". The video is available using four terms in Google search: Coover Penn Reading Video. (His reading from "Noir" occupies the final minutes of the QuickTime video). If the interview and video generally pique your interest, and if you would not be put off by what is essentially a light entertainment paradoxically burdened with down-and-dirty stretches of bleak pessimism and erotic haunting, then by all means read "Noir". Or, consider either of the following two alternatives to "Noir" as a better first experience of Coover's world: "Pricksongs and Descants", his ground-breaking short story collection; or "The Origin of the Brunists", a more conventional, generous and very American tale of the spawning of a religious cult in a mining community. And finally, if you can find a used or library copy of "A Political Fable: The Cat in the Hat for President" (unfairly, it's currently out-of-print), please seize the pleasure of reading it. It may very well become your favorite piece of zaniness by any author ever. It is mine.

Finally, here are a few stray perceptions of my own to share with Coover fans who have finished the book.

Coover is nothing if not quotable. Wherever you are in "Noir" you are not far from coming upon yet another astringent observation about humankind's bleak condition, endless variations on the theme of "your incorrigible weakness in a meaningless universe" (page 103). We sing a ballad "meant to provoke reflections upon life's brevity, and its thin sad beauty" (page 108). "The city was as bounded as a gameboard, no place to hide in it, no way but one to leave it, you alone defenseless in it, your moves not even your own" (page 175). Most Hobbesian of all is this: "The body has to eat and drink so it can stay healthy long enough to enjoy an agonizing death, and the mind, to help out, has to know where the provisions are and how to get them and who else is after them and how to kill them" (page 159). And yet, at the novel's close, a glimpse of something vital: "You can't escape the melody but you can make it your own."

Borrowings from films are abundant: the shifting cityscape of "Dark City" (page 163), the mirror room scene in "The Lady from Shanghai" (page 181), and the false-identity caper "Catch Me If You Can" (page 186).

At one point Philip Noir tries to recall who it was who once likened an odd juxtaposition to "a pearl onion on a banana split." (The line belongs to Raymond Chandler's Marlowe). When another character advises, "Plant you now, dig you later, man" (page 111) , this is a twofer or maybe a three-way: its source is the jazz world of the 1920's/30's, but the phrase also was used as a title of a song in "Pal Joey" and later as the title of a "Gilligan's Island" episode -- facts surely not lost on pop culture maven Coover. Philip Noir notices a few words carved into a wooden tabletop at a jazz joint: "You are the music while the music lasts." This is a line from "The Dry Salvages", the third section of "Four Quartets" by T.S. Eliot. Serious readers more adept than me (with or without benefit of Google search) will score rich points in this endless game of spot-the-allusion.

I wonder whether the sympathetic character of Michiko ("she's a work of art") is Coover's homage to the sympathetic critic of his work, Michiko Kakutani. Then again, given the fate Coover assigns to the fictitious Michiko, I'm thinking maybe this is best left unexplored. As the author himself cautions:

"It's all quite simple. But sometimes not knowing is better. It's more interesting."

(Mike Ettner)

Robert Coover Gets with His Inner Gumshoe

You read a lot of hard-boiled fiction. Maybe even a little too much. The kinda little too much Cocteau called "just enough." You cut your teeth on Chandler and Hammett and James M. Cain. Learned to crack wise through Mickey Spillane. You got your dark view of the world from Jim Thompson. Consider yourself an authority on Elmore Leonard. And you've spent a good chunk of a hard life alongside walk-alones like Travis McGee, Hoke Mosley, Harry Bosch and Elvis Cole.

You prefer alleys to main drags, suits to denim, highballs to beer. You speak fast, think once and never apologize, no matter how wrong they say you are. You've got swollen knuckles, a tin ear and a chip on your shoulder that's been around so long it's got a name.

When you heard word that Robert Coover had gotten with his inner gumshoe, you weren't mad. In fact, you were pleased by the news. You saw that he called his experiment Noir, and you said "What else?" And when you got the book in your hands, you didn't put it down until you'd reached The End.

You didn't mind that the antihero's name was Philip M. Noir because you know it comes from the best. You didn't care that the bad guy was called Mr. Big, the alley cat was christened Rats, or that Noir had the hots for a dame named Flame. You were even somewhat charmed by the fact that "her lovers were called moths."

You dug the stuttering neon, the puddled shadows, the holstered heaters. And you knew what was coming when the veiled widow showed up in need of a peeper. Tomorrow was gonna be black-and-blue, and you couldn't wait.

In truth, the whole book is a bruise, punctuated by dead bodies, and it smarts. You wouldn't have wanted it any other way. And since you too have been "sucked into stories that have already been told," you already knew how hard would be "to step out of it." But you also know that "it's not the story you're trapped in," it's "how you play it out. Your style. Class. The moves you make."

You see that now, here, in Coover's shady strut through the "dark damp night." Just as you saw it then, in Chandler and Hammett and Cain. You recognize the "filthy, smoky, gloomy, rank" as if it were an old friend. You too have walked these streets, made these mistakes, lived these myths. And you will continue reading these stories until there are no more words.

From Bound 3/11/2010 SunPost Weekly
[...]

Redolent of Raymond Chandler's iconic private eye Philip Marlow and Dashiell Hammett's Sam Spade, Coover's coincidentally named Philip M. Noir pays tribute to the genre with this hilariously ribald, hard-boiled private eye mystery. The prolific Brown University professor's first novel earned the 1966 William Faulkner Award. This is Coover's 23rd work of fiction, after 1998's GHOST TOWN, and his first foray into experimental crime fiction in second-person narration ("You" versus "I"). Through second-person narrative, "you" sample wine "from some country you've never heard of called Bordox. Sounds like an antacid or a cleansing agent. Tastes like one, too."

Dubious characters Rats, Snark and Creep "live in a different world. It was called daytime." When Noir claims someone poisoned "you" by putting something in your drink, sassy assistant Blanche says, "Yeah. It's called alcohol." Though you are in a perpetual booze-haze, "a hunch is to a gumshoe what a skirt is to a letch: a tease; pursuit; trouble." You-as-Noir are "not so much a private eye as an eyer of privates. Your university days." The lack of quote marks surrounding dialogue is only slightly disconcerting, a ruse that causes readers to slow down and enjoy the sojourn.

A sexy mystery woman with noir secrets hidden behind widow's weeds hires gumshoe Noir to investigate her husband's mysterious death. When Blanche asks "Whatever made you take up this case?" Noir responds, "Well, she has nice legs." ("You randy old letch.")

A mystic muse, Coover introduces his irreverent, avant garde interpretation of the detective novel with zany but richly written hyperbole. You "tugged your fedora down...hands in trenchcoat pockets, stepped out into the grim wet night. The streets were wearing their heavy shadows as if dressed for a wake." You feel as though you're in a movie, playing the part of Bogart and Bacall characters. You instinctively know that patience is essential, when you can't extract information from recalcitrant suspects. "If you make a story with gaps in it, people just step in to fill them up, they can't help themselves."

Not sure if it's booze or a seemingly daily blow to the head that kayoed you, you wake "at the morgue. The refrigerated vaults. You're in a cadaver drawer." Not knowing how you got there, you know only that you have to get out. You're not ready for The Big Sleep.

It's not You-as-Noir who's hard-boiled, it's the world in which you live and how you deal with diabolical characters. NOIR will "grab you by the nads and drag you into a webby plot not of your own devising." But there's "trouble with webs. When you're in one, you can't see past the next knot."

NOIR is highly recommended for readers who enjoy wit and humor with realism and satire. "That's right, sweetheart."

---Reviewed by L. Dean Murphy

As soon as the femme fatale entered his office private investigator Noir knew she was trouble and wanted to tell her to take a hike. However, she is beautiful and besides his unpaid office assistant who believes she is the boss Blanche would kill him if he rejected a paying customer. She explains she was a nurse to the dying wife of a wealthy man; when the spouse died she became wife number two. Now her husband is a murder victim and she hires Philip M. Noir to find his killer and protect her from his partner Mr. Big.

As Noir investigates without even knowing his client's name, he fails to keep her safe from a killer. Stunned, he goes to the morgue to look at the corpse, but the body along with her clothing is missing. Noir searches for clues to who killed his paying customer as Blanche labels his work as "The Case of the Vanishing Black Widow". Receiving beatings and dishing out more, Noir works the crappy dives, the middle class dives and the affluent dives with his best progress occurring when he is knock out; when he is conscious Noir goes backwards.

Not for everyone, this is a great insane investigative thriller as if Max Smart turned into a Noir private investigator working the mean streets, tunnels under the streets, and a few less populated by even rats locales. The jocular story line focuses on Noir's horrific sleuthing skills that lampoon the sub-genre starting with the detective who has no idea who his client is except she is loaded (money and boobs) nor who her late husband was. With perhaps the wildest final twist of the year to aptly climax the insanity, fans who relish a satirical sleuthing spin will appreciate the escapades of Robert Coover's zany antihero Philip M. Noir with the M being a family thing.

Harriet Klausner

Robert Coover Gets with His Inner Gumshoe
By John Hood

You read a lot of hard-boiled fiction. Maybe even a little too much. The kinda little too much Cocteau called "just enough." You cut your teeth on Chandler and Hammett and James M. Cain. Learned to crack wise through Mickey Spillane. You got your dark view of the world from Jim Thompson. Consider yourself an authority on Elmore Leonard. And you've spent a good chunk of a hard life alongside walk-alones like Travis McGee, Hoke Mosley, Harry Bosch and Elvis Cole.

You prefer alleys to main drags, suits to denim, highballs to beer. You speak fast, think once and never apologize, no matter how wrong they say you are. You've got swollen knuckles, a tin ear and a chip on your shoulder that's been around so long it's got a name.

When you heard word that Robert Coover had gotten with his inner gumshoe, you weren't mad. In fact, you were pleased by the news. You saw that he called his experiment Noir, and you said "What else?" And when you got the book in your hands, you didn't put it down until you'd reached The End.

You didn't mind that the antihero's name was Philip M. Noir because you know it comes from the best. You didn't care that the bad guy was called Mr. Big, the alley cat was christened Rats, or that Noir had the hots for a dame named Flame. You were even somewhat charmed by the fact that "her lovers were called moths."

You dug the stuttering neon, the puddled shadows, the holstered heaters. And you knew what was coming when the veiled widow showed up in need of a peeper. Tomorrow was gonna be black-and-blue, and you couldn't wait.

In truth, the whole book is a bruise, punctuated by dead bodies, and it smarts. You wouldn't have wanted it any other way. And since you too have been "sucked into stories that have already been told," you already knew how hard would be "to step out of it." But you also know that "it's not the story you're trapped in," it's "how you play it out. Your style. Class. The moves you make."

You see that now, here, in Coover's shady strut through the "dark damp night." Just as you saw it then, in Chandler and Hammett and Cain. You recognize the "filthy, smoky, gloomy, rank" as if it were an old friend. You too have walked these streets, made these mistakes, lived these myths. And you will continue reading these stories until there are no more words.

From Bound 3/11/2010 SunPost Weekly

All the elements of a Phillip Marlowe hard boiled crime detective novel are there: a wise cracking private detective, Philip Noir, hard at work attempting to solve the murder of a widow's husband, dark and rainy wind swept city streets, shady supporting characters named Blue, Rats, Mister Big, Pug, the Hammer, Fingers, and the Fat Man. Add in Noir's helpful, seemingly indispensible, if somewhat pushy private secretary with the name of Blanche (Black and White), and a mysterious woman, whom Noir follows because she wears tight stockings with seams in them. To make things worse, the widow disappears. Is she dead? Does she even exist?

It took me quite a long time in this relatively short (192 page) crime novel to see that Mr. Coover has, all along, been putting the reader on. What would one expect in a crime novel where the detective wears women's lace panties and who wakes up in a refrigerator drawer in a morgue? _Noir_, like the Raymond Chandler books, is often funny, even if deliberately darkly so.

I almost never put a book down, even if I don't happen to like it. I only made it to page 88 of this one, and that was painful. The plot is boring and convoluted, and the humor childish. If you're a 12 year old boy you'll probably enjoy the jokes. Otherwise, look elsewhere. Life is too short to spend reading stuff like this.