[The] fiction of Robert Coover is tightly unified by its metafictional impulses. In examining the concept of man-as-fiction-maker, nearly all of Coover's works deal with characters busily constructing systems to play with or to help them deal with their chaotic lives. Some of these systems are clearly fictional in nature…. Yet Coover's work is filled with hints that other, less obviously artificial systems—such as mathematics, science, religion, myth, and the perspectives of history and politics—are also fictional at their core. Indeed, in most of Coover's fiction there exists a tension between the process of man creating his fictions and his desire to assert that his systems have an independent existence of their own. For Coover, this tension typically results in man losing sight of the fictional basis of his systems and eventually becoming trapped within them.

In developing this view of man-as-fiction-maker, Coover is hoping to...