More sprawling in its scope and more overtly political than anything else he has written except for the story, "The Cat in the Hat for President," The Public Burning is the most defiant of Coover's novels. Whereas The Origin of the Brunists (1966) creates an epistemological fable about the development of religious frenzy and the The Universal Baseball Association (1968) creates a fable about the nature of epistemology itself, The Public Burning explores the fabular nature of political history. Tiger Miller of the Brunists said, when sending out misleading copy early in the Brunists' evolution, "Such are history's documents." This could form an epigraph for The Public Burning in that Coover fashions his most explicitly political fiction around the degree to which political history is actually a set of fictions approved by those in power to explain and make legitimate their origins.

The Public Burning is centrally concerned...