One thing [the sodomy episode in The Public Burning] brings out is how boringly enthralled and confused [Coover] is by sex, like many contemporary American novelists. This fantasy of anal sex is not nearly as good as the immediately preceding episode, a surrealistically transformed version of the execution of Julius and Ethel Rosenberg. The book should have ended here, especially as this is the "public burning" of the title. But Robert Coover evidently has a Mailer-like view of sodomy as something physically and morally dirty, and hence the conviction that to do it or write about it is interestingly outrageous….

The reader's strongest impression of The Public Burning will probably be of a prodigious feat of assimilation and assembly of historical fact, both ephemeral and substantial….

Generally the torrent of allusions has an almost perfervid liveliness, and shows brilliant powers of verbal mimicry. The crassness of the Nixon...