DANIEL AARON
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his son-in-law, the latter himself suspected of murdering his wife, the
Texan's socialite daughter. The case inspires a book arguing the
culpability of the father, and he in turn sues the publisher and author.
Meanwhile the book has been sold to the films, and when a famous
director arrives to observe the trial, accusers and accused respond
histrionically to his presence and play their assigned roles like profes–
sional actors.
It
is almost as if the movie scene has become the reality, as
if the Texas story or the one about the mother convicted of killing her
two children (the subject of two books) or the exploits of the "Son of
Sam" are not really graspable until translated into Media language.
Philip Roth, the novelist, expressed this idea some years ago in a
much quoted passage. The modern writer, Roth said, "has his hands
full in trying to understand and then describe, and then make
credible
much of the American reality. It stupefies, it sickens, it infuriates, and
finally it is a kind of embarrassment to one's imagination. The
actuality is continually outdoing our talents and the culture tosses up
figures almost daily that are the envy of any novelist." Perhaps this
sense of monstrous quotidian "actuality" accounts for his own some–
times amusing but heavy-handed parody,
Our Gang
(1971), in which
President Trick E. Dixon and his White House entourage blather over
the abominations they have promoted. Starting with the premises of
the Nixon administration, Roth manufactures an extended black joke
almost as grotesque as Coover's. His imaginary situations-a massacre
of the Boy Scouts, an invasion of Denmark (pornographic center of the
world), exposure of plotters-are hardly less fantastic than the stories
pouring out of the Media to an audience conditioned to regard history,
past and present, as lurid entertainment made up largely of plots and
conspiracies.
The conspiracy theme has a long history in America. Charges of
subversion have been used with good effect against Masons, abolition–
ists, Catholics, Negroes, Jews, Communists, Fascists, and capitalists.
It
is particularly compelling for temperaments impatient with complex–
ity and receptive to cut-and-dried polarities. In this time of foreign and
domestic machinations, the conspiracy obsession gathers strength and
quickens imagination. J.F.K. and Martin Luther King were obviously
the victims of plotters, and literary sleuths have demonstrated how
insiders did in Abe Lincoln. But why stop there? The Garfield business
looks pretty fishy ("disappointed office seeker" indeed!) and don't tell
us that Leon Czolgosz pulled off the McKinley caper by himself. To
American Manichaeans, irrespective of class, the Kingdoms of Light
and Dark that President Eisenhower held forth on in Coover's novel
