DANIEL AARON
237
Nixon, unlike any of the other characters in the novel, is examined in
depth and not always unsympathetically. A sensitive and self–
mortifying little man peeps out occasionally from under the hard
mask. In his fantasies, he can identify with the Rosenbergs, for he too is
an outsider trying to ingratiate himself with his tormentors. But he is
also vindictive and cowardly, and his moments of insight about his
superiors and inferiors and the shabby trial are followed by explosions
of fatuity: dreams of converting America into a continental suburbia,
visions of himself as an international hero. Coover, in complete
command of Nixoniana and committed to smashing Nixon to smither–
eens, will finally not concede his humanity even though it is sometimes
hard to distinguish Nixon's voice from his own.
As
for the Jewish
couple whose trial bedevils Nixon's inner life as it advances his
political fortunes, Coover is hardly the ardent advocate. He sees them
as dreary innocents, decent enough and poignant but middlebrow in
their tastes and not very smart. Their guilt or innocence is of less
consequence to him than the mania of their traducers.
To convey the flavor of the Cold War era, Coover floods his novel
with topical allusions both familiar and esoteric
an~
like Doctorow
counts on the pleasure his readers may derive from identifying such
Zeitgeist
indicators as Bobo Olson, Olristine Jorgenson, Luke Ap–
pling, Clark Kent, Bojangles Robinson, Johnny Mack Brown, Martha
Raye, Irving Saypol, James Hagerty, Young Widow Brown, Punjab,
David Greenglass, Dick Button, Lionel Stander, Dale Carnegie, and
James Montgomery Flagg. He revives hoary political jokes and ran–
sacks newspapers, literary texts, songs-more than a decade of popular
culture-for tags to authenticate his assault against a squalid and
haunted society. The Great American Joke, reiterated in Coover's
clever parodies of radio entertainment, hangs on variations of the
failure of potency. Uncle Sam's humor is crude and brutal, because
crudity reminds Americans of the good old days when Columbia was
full of piss and vinegar and answered her critics with a sock on the jaw.
A hodgepodge of names and songs and allusions to forgotten
incidents may provoke nostalgic recollection, but the denseness and
fluidity of the past are not recaptured through necrologies. Coover is a
dazzling performer, witty, inventive, intelligent, and his novel is full of
powerful moments: the scene, for example, in which a crowd tumbles
out of a three-dimensional horror film into an equally phantasmagori–
cal Times Square. I take it that the burning of the Rosenbergs is
intended to represent only one fantastic chapter in the fantasy of
history, that like the movie crowd we awaken from our private
