Robert Coover’s Outrageous 1977 Novel About U.S. Politics, Is Even More Relevant Now

It was a congressional aide, of all people, who clued me in to “The Public Burning,” Robert Coover’s magnificent novel about American politics, which is even more relevant today than when first published, to puzzlement and acclaim, in 1977. We were eating pastrami sandwiches on I Street in Washington, D.C., sometime during the hopeful early days of the Biden administration, and I asked the aide for a tip — one never just has lunch or a drink in Washington. Instead of conveying the latest piece of Capitol Hill gossip, as is the norm, he directed me to Coover’s classic.

It remains the best tip I’ve ever gotten, a scoop I am pleased to share with you now. Coover died in October, just as reality finally caught up to his masterpiece, an “extraordinary act of moral passion,” as a reviewer for The New York Times wrote at the time, a “destructive device that will not easily be defused.” Starring Richard Nixon, “The Public Burning” mocks our politics and our culture by wallowing in both. References to 1950s ephemera score writing so alive that the sentences seem almost to vibrate, like particles let loose by a madman. “It is a glorious, slam-bang, star-spangled fiction,” the novelist William H. Gass wrote in an introduction to a 1998 edition, “and every awful word of it is true.”

Well, true-ish. The novel’s title refers to the execution of Ethel and Julius Rosenberg, for allegedly passing atomic secrets to the Soviets, in 1953: “thieves of light to be burned by light,” as Coover describes their turns in the electric chair at Sing Sing. In “The Book of Daniel,” published six years earlier, E.L. Doctorow had rendered their deaths as family tragedy; here, they are a national farce staged smack in the middle of Times Square.

A sign glows above the stage where the Rosenbergs will fry: “AMERICA THE HOPE OF THE WORLD.” Only the words are “metamorphosing a letter at a time right before the eyes of astonished passers-by” until a less sunny message materializes: “AMERICA THE JOKE OF THE WORLD.” D’oh!

Coover’s imagination is chronically unrestrained, but the premise of “The Public Burning” is startlingly simple. Nixon, then Dwight D. Eisenhower’s vice president, is going to wrap up affairs in Washington before taking the train to New York to watch the Rosenberg spectacle. As far as plot goes, that’s really about it.

The novel opens with that most mundane of Washington rituals: a news conference. Three days earlier, Eisenhower had warned Dartmouth graduates not to “join the book burners,” a reference to the red-baiting senator Joseph McCarthy of Wisconsin and his counsel Roy Cohn, who helped prosecute the case against the Rosenbergs. Now Eisenhower is defending those remarks before the Washington press corps, as he did in real life. Meanwhile, at the Supreme Court, Justice William O. Douglas (to whom Coover dedicates the novel) is about to grant a stay of execution in the Rosenbergs’ case.