Charlie in the House of Rue is a miniature tragicomedy which takes as its point of departure the character and conventions of a Charlie Chaplin film. The leading character is not only named Charlie, but he also physically resembles Chaplin…. Charlie falls into the same straits as his namesake, employs characteristic gestures (e.g., twirling his cane), and possesses the same elastic naivete. As the story progresses, however, we are drawn away from our preconceptions about a Chaplinesque Charlie and into the dream-like, funhouse world of Coover.

The aesthetic problem of translating literature into the medium of film is a commonly discussed one, but Coover's opposite task is equally difficult and interesting. Like Joyce's experiments in Ulysses in writing prose that resembles other nonverbal media (such as the fugue), Coover's words create the texture of a silent Charlie Chaplin movie.

The text preserves certain formal aspects of film...