SOURCE: Cornis-Pope, Marcel. “Rewriting the Encounter with the Other: Narrative and Cultural Transgression in The Public Burning.” Critique 42, no. 1 (fall 2000): 40–50.

In the following essay, Cornis-Pope discusses Coover's evocation of “otherness” and marginality in The Public Burning, especially as portrayed through the novel's composite voices and Nixon's interactions with the tyrannical Uncle Sam character and the scapegoated Ethel Rosenberg.

Though his eyes are closed, his senses withdrawn, for one vivid moment he sees himself at a distance in the Fairy's arms. […] What he sees up there is a decrepit misshapen creature, neither man nor puppet, entangled in blue hair and lying in an unhinged sprawl in the embrace of a monstrous being […] grotesque. Hideous. Beautiful. […] Somewhere, out on the surface, distant now as his forgotten life, fingers dance like children at play and soft lips kiss the ancient hurts away.

(Pinocchio in Venice 329–30)

Thus ends Pinocchio in Venice (1991), Robert...