La festa de Gerald

by Robert Coover, Jordi Larios (Translator)

Ros, una actriu de teatre i de cinema pornogràfic, apareix de sobte assassinada en la festa que Gerald dóna a casa seva. Aquest és el primer d'un seguit de fets, alhora extraordinaris i banals, que anem descobrint amb el seguiment minuciós de tot el que el protagonista fa, diu, sent i recorda en les hores que triga a acabar la festa: la investigació de la policia, les altres morts, les persecucions sexuals, l'homenatge de la gent de teatre a l'actriu morta...

Genres: Fiction, American, Literature, Contemporary, United States, 20th Century, The United States Of America

392 pages, Paperback

First published January 1, 1986

About the author

Robert Lowell Coover was an American novelist, short story writer, and T. B. Stowell Professor Emeritus in Literary Arts at Brown University. He is generally considered a writer of fabulation and metafiction. He became a proponent of electronic literature and was a founder of the Electronic Literature Organization.

Reviews

[Vit Babenco · Rating 5 out of 5]

Robert Coover seems to have been partying hard one too many times…

I followed him back into the living room where Roger was still carrying on pathetically over Ros’s corpse. Tania had knelt beside him and was trying to console him, draw him away from the body, but he was beyond her reach. Beyond anybody’s. He was wild with grief, looked a terror, his front now as bloody as Ros’s. His face seemed twisted, as if a putty mask were being torn away from it, and people watching him were twisting up, too. Vic’s girlfriend Eileen had apparently fainted and was lying on the gold couch.

Gerald’s Party is a mystery but it has gone a far distance from pulp fiction. It isn’t Ten Little Niggers so in spite of all the disasters mass enjoyment continues and the party must go on…
Cynical acid runs in streams…

God saved Lot, you’ll remember, so Lot afterward could fuck his daughters, but he froze the wife for looking back. On the surface, that doesn’t make a lot of sense. But the radical message of that legend is that incest, sodomy, betrayal and all that are not crimes – only turning back is: rigidified memory, attachment to the past.

Gerald’s Party is everything – history, religion, art, bohemian ways of life and an allegory of human society.
Some are born to sweet delight…

[BlackOxford · Rating 3 out of 5]

Playing Monsters

As with life, the purpose of the eponymous party is unclear. A celebration? A recurrent fixture? The start or finish of something? The narrative starts without context. So the point seems to be the revelation of the character of the party-goers, of which there are many. A genealogical chart would certainly have helped to relieve a relationship complexity worthy of Tolstoy.

Events in the party pass very quickly from trivial chit-chat to the far more serious matters of sex and death. The apparently much used and abused body of young Ros is discovered lying just below the level of conversation. Police are summoned who, while conducting a somewhat bizarre investigation, beat Ros’s hysterical husband to death with croquet mallets.

Meanwhile the party re-gains lost momentum. Drinks are distributed, canapés prepared and served, splattered blood from Ros’s wound washed, wiped and laundered. Vignettes of the various flirtations, copulations and other sexual adventures throughout the house are described in detail.

I’m guessing there is a large metaphor lurking just beyond my conceptual reach. Perhaps this party is the world for Coover, with all its damaged inhabitants. Or is Ros a sort of goddess of language, passed around and exploited mercilessly? Time puts in an appearance as a sort of running joke. The incompetence of the police team suggests a criticism of the institutional establishment of society. Or is it that Coover wants to shake the reader Into “the restless paralysis that always attends any affront to habit”?

“We’ve been playing monsters,” the title’s Gerald says to his young son at one point in order to explain his disheveled appearance. And that seems to me the key to the book. People are more or less monsters. This only becomes clear when you get to see them drunk and in large groups. In vino veritas indeed. Or is it just too sophisticated for my rustic temperament?

[mark monday · Rating 3 out of 5]

the writing here is dark and sardonic. some rare moments of realistic emotion occasionally intrude upon the constantly surreal tableau. i might have had a problem with what appears to be consistent misogyny... but there's plenty of misandry to go around too, so i suppose one could say that the author is even-handed in doling out the various moments of criminal shallowness, tunnel-vision, and all-around nastiness. despite the often despairing ideas on display, it's not too heavy a read - coover has an appealingly light touch. and there's genuine fun to be had overall in just rushing through this extended depiction of a party where everyone overindulges, gets laid, questions lifelong commitments, and are too superficial to notice their own bleeding angst. what a party! i think i must have the wrong friends. that gerald's a real prick though.

don't expect anything remotely like a conventional narrative. it's pomo, homo. expect stream-of-conscious ramblings, unattributed "dialogue", and berserk nonsensical behavior featuring a dead body, and then another, and no one letting those bodies interfere with getting their drink or fetish on. it's all pretty much the opposite of quote realistic unquote. or is it?

[Tony · Rating 4 out of 5]

I have to tell it this way........

When I was in my last year of college, my roommate recommended that I take a class called 'French Literature in Translation'. At the time I was immersed in German and Russian Literature and was certain I would find the The Answer there. So, pourquoi?, I asked Howard.

Howard explained that it had nothing to do with Jean Cocteau, although I might find his name in the syllabus. No, he said, it was Janet. Janet!

Janet was the professor in 'French Literature in Translation'...and Howard was in love with her. She was young, as professors go, and, for the time, avant garde. Howard had taken the class but knew her otherwise, having traveled in the same artistic circles. Well, it was not exactly organic chemistry, so.....hi, ho, hi ho.

Janet was as advertised. Jeans and tank tops, colorful scarves. A passion for literature. An occasional f-bomb. She cultivated gay students when there was still a huge closet. If you were the kind of sap who would fall head over heels for a lovely college literature professor, she was your guy. The class was okay, although, from my seat in the back, it seemed, just wearing colorful clothes (the students) didn't make you particularly insightful.

Anyhow, Janet made it a rule that every student had to come to her office for a 'mid-term'. It was just a discussion, not a test, but that didn't stop wags (looking around) from calling it an oral exam. I scheduled mine at the last time available one day. I showed up, jeans, flannel and an attitude; and I knocked on the open door.

Janet was aflutter, having nothing to do with me. She said, "Fuck this, can we go to the bar?" Well, that was actually my major, so, "Sure"...hoping she was buying. The short walk to the bar, guy that I was, I was already composing my letter. Dear Penthouse Forum: I never thought this would happen to me......

I forget what we talked about. But I tend to be more charming and insightful after a couple. I passed the mid-term, in other words, although no Penthouse material was forthcoming. That didn't stop me from exaggerating the meeting to Howard, waiting on pins and needles, but, I figured, I'm going to hell anyhow.

Near the end of the semester, the last book was Ubu Roi. Now I don't know if you've ever read Ubu Roi but it's some weird shit. Some French make-believe king who has a series of adventures that become more and more bizarre. Absurdist. Oh, well. There are things you have to do in college.

Now, I was always pretty good at reading a book and then writing about it; got me through various levels of education. Reviews, I think they're called. But this Ubu Roi had me stumped. I mean, it's absurd; what do you want me to say? For whatever reason, I could not just bang it out.

The weekend came. My paper wasn't done for Tuesday's class, but it was, you know, the weekend. One of the great things about having Howard as a roommate was that he always went home on the weekends. And I was in a Budding Romance. So, Saturday night, I dimmed the lights. No hurry. We'd have all weekend. In mid-nuzzle, there was an urgent rap at the door. It took a while, but I got there, and opened the door a crack. There was Howard. This might be a good time to mention that Howard was particularly short, maybe 5'3" or 5'4". He wasn't usually shit-faced, but he was shit-faced that night. Next to him, very tightly, was a 6'2" blonde in an evening gown. Gentleman that I am, I didn't look to see if she had an Adam's apple. This was an emergency, what they call it. And it was only fair to yield the room to the besotted Howard (I didn't mention Janet).

So much for Budding Romance, although these things work out.

So we bid adieu. I was, all of a sudden, alone. But that's always been okay with me. I sat outside the dorm building, on a lovely Spring evening/morning, and watched the passing panoply of life. It's quite the show, you know, when you aren't doing anything. Ever-changing characters and storylines. And no commercials. It was, well, absurd. The whole night. And all of it.

So, I wrote it in my mind first; and then, after a proper breakfast, on an electric typewriter. Inchoate sex, interrupted by Toulouse-Latrec and a giant Amazon. Shit-canned on the street. Where the fun really begins.

I thought I had nailed it. I felt I had got to the core of Ubu Roi and wrote the paper in an experimental way, mimicking Alfred Jarry. Oh, Fame, Fortune, and Penthouse Forum!

Maybe not so much. I'm not sure what it was. Maybe I introduced some homosexual characters in a way she felt was politically insensitive. Maybe there was some unknown code in there that rankled. Maybe it just wasn't any good. (Really?) Regardless, as she was handing out the papers, she set her face in stone and said, "I should read this to the class," meaning, I would be publicly humiliated.

So there I was, cusping. I coulda been a..... I don't know. One kind word, who knows.

----- ----- ----- ----- ----- -----

If someone did not get what Robert Coover was doing, he didn't care. He didn't go to law school. Instead, he blew the top off what is possible.

This is bacchanalia. But really filthy bacchanalia. Offensive. And not everything written is possible. Stylistically, there might be four or five conversations going on at the same time. Purposely so. There is comedy and sexual abuse and art appraisal and adultery and murder. But it's all of a piece.

And then, the spinning stops, just for a few pages, and Coover - clearly Coover, here - tells a story about 'his' grandmother, and how she told him a good night story every night about a man who had to climb a staircase with a thousand steps to get to heaven. There was a story or more on every step and he always fell asleep first, until the night he didn't. It was, as my grandmother had intended from the first step on, her principal legacy to me...

Mostly though, what Coover sees, is absurdity. He writes it that way. Because, how else?

----- ----- ----- ----- -----

I offended, as I often do, without intention. We never spoke again. Another callous, which is wrong of me, I know that. I saw something as I sat on a bench, locked out of my room. Smelled it too. What was real became a story. And the story became real. I had a glimpse.

It was never about a teacher taking a student for drinks. And not about my lying to Howard. It's not about sex on a Saturday night. It's this, and only this:

Don't put Ubu Roi in my hands unless you mean it.

[MJ Nicholls · Rating 3 out of 5]

This is the sort of book people write drooling dribbling cock-tugging theses about—the multifariousness of its structure and tropes and voices is denser than a chocolate-and-toffee car park cake (a cake the size of an actual car park). I toggled between three and four stars because I was with then not-with then with then not-with the novel about nine times per page, lapsing from amusement into rage, from rage into arousal, from arousal into boredom, from boredom into amazement, from amazement into suicidal thoughts . . . and on and on. The US edition has a cover showing a Roman bacchanalia—this is more apposite a whetter than “dinner party from hell” (unless taken literally), or nihilistic postmodern romp, though both those elements are dominant. Basically, Ros is a slutty actress who is found dead at a dinner party which is happening in a house somewhere, and some characters respond normally (wailing and such), while others behave like psychotics, perverts, unhinged nutballs, and bad comedians, and abuse her corpse with emphasis on the crotch. Gerald spends his time wiping arses, placating his ill-placed son, and trying to screw Alison while a range of drunken voices twit around him and pull the narrative over here, over here, over here, and over here, then back here, then over here, then oh look someone’s been shot in the head oh well better have sex with this teenage whore and get stuck in her vagina, then over here, then over here into a marsh of tagless dialogue running for twenty pages or so, then into another farcical sex scene of questionable morality. I think I started out trying to praise this novel. Well, don’t read it unless you’re familiar with plotless formless hardcore PoMo antinovels that demand dissection. Otherwise, the comedic set-pieces and exhausting pace, the blurred distinction between theatre and reality, truth and exaggeration . . . all interesting nooks of interest for the avant-garde bookman.

[Mala · Rating 2 out of 5]

2.5 stars

'...this party of yours is the true disturbance. Maybe all conventions are, all efforts at social intercourse.' (128)

Remember that creepy phone call scene from Lynch's Lost Highway?
In its better moments Gerald's Party reaches those dreadful palpitations, for the most part though; it meanders aimlessly with occasional scenes of (interrupted or otherwise) fornication, a body turning up every now & then, a deflowering which would be outrageous were it not so ridiculous, an a** wiping scene that goes on for what seems like ages—despite all that, this remains the most boring arty tarty party ever.

'You’ve got drug addicts here! You’ve got perverts, anarchists, pimps, and peeping toms! Adulterers! You’ve got dipsomaniacs! You’ve got whores, thugs, thieves, atheists, sodomists, and out-and-out lunatics! There isn’t anything they wouldn’t do!' (130)

One would think that with a guest list like that, this party would be fun fun fun but don't get your hopes too high 'cause this is the most banal group of people gathered together & after a while, I wished that Gerald's harried wife would mix rat poison in the food & put them all out of their misery—that would be mercy killing, you know.

I was totally confused. I didn’t know whether the night was running forward or backward.

Same here!
Gerald's Party remains a mishmash of a Roman bacchanalia & a Boschian nightmare. I could call it an Agatha Christie on steroids but that would be a lazy observation—the grand dame would be horrified by that: her books so carefully plotted, her moral universe intact in its just balancing of crime & punishment, while here what we mostly get is a rambling, impressionistic first person narrative via Gerald's consciousness ( with endless random dialogues [attributed & otherwise] from other characters hitting you from everywhere). An endless parade of characters, rather voices - cacophony & claustrophobia all around.
But then Coover is on record stating that he likes to take genre literature on their own turf & beat them at their own game—so, if in Lucky Pierre, he outporns porn; here, is a parodic take on parlour murder mysteries that take themselves too seriously. For Coover writing is all about play: play with form, play with subject. It's just that the play here gets too tedious & if that's a commentary on the banal lives of these banal people, then five stars for that!

In Birdman, Iñárritu had captured an essential fear of being caught naked/exposed in public, likewise, Gerald's Party is, in a way, every party giver's nightmare: a party that never ends, guests that never leave, leaving the hosts at their wits' end, providing constantly for food & entertainment, the toilet gets clogged ( nicking 1/2 star for that. Yeah I know shit happens; I just don't want to be reminded of that.), & you've guests here with secret links & histories—no wonder the body count begins.
If chaos frightens you then the deafening silence that follows it here is even more frightening in its despair.
But that's taking a charitable view. Truth is it's mostly about the alternating attraction between the twin poles of Eros & Thanatos where this Gerald guy is attracted to a mysterious guest called Alison, looking for a suitable opportunity to have sex with her & getting interrupted, & Alison getting humped by practically every other male (even females?) in the party. I'll just say those a**holes deserved it.

A kind of odd stuttering tale that refused to unfold, but rather became ever more mysterious and self-enclosed, drawing us sweetly toward its inner profundities. (83)

The ending brought a curious twist: life as a performance, & gave some idea about why these people carried on nonchalantly despite the deaths around them but by that time I was too exhausted to care—I was glad the party was finally over.

Edit: 19/10/15
I should also mention Lynch's Blue Velvet wrt this book: white picket fences & beautiful gardens in perfectly normal happy-looking suburban homes, and the festering reality below the ground... Gerald's Party also takes us to that space & if you find that unrealistic—just remember that Coover learnt his realism from guys like Kafka!

***************
Here are the professional reviews:

http://www.nytimes.com/1985/12/19/boo...

https://shigekuni.wordpress.com/2009/...

[Christopher Robinson · Rating 5 out of 5]

Having attended Gerald’s Party and by some miracle made it out alive and sane, I can report that it is absolutely incredible. Coover drops you into this social-function-as-Hell and expects you to sort it all out, extract something from all of the conversational chaos and warped histrionics, and much to my surprise it wasn’t nearly as challenging as I figured it would have been.

On a basic level, Gerald’s Party is very funny and fast-paced. The story is completely absurd (in the best possible way), the characterizations frequently quite grotesque and feverishly exaggerated. The word “cartoonish” could be safely applied. I don’t know anybody in real life who speaks or behaves like these people, and I’m glad for that. (Of course, that’s not to say that people like this don’t exist. Frankly, it wouldn’t surprise me.) It all makes for one hell of an entertaining read. The humor is quite dark, disturbing, occasionally downright revolting, and it will no doubt offend many readers. But me, I loved it.

The effect is similar to the things that Gaddis did in the lengthy party scenes in The Recognitions, albeit quite a bit easier to follow in the case of Gerald’s Party because the dialogue is often, but not always, attributed. Granted, there are A LOT of characters, and it can sometimes be a challenge to remember who everyone is. But once you get a feel for who the main players are, it’s significantly less arduous reading than I would have thought. Indeed, I’ve been nervously putting off reading this one for many a moon due to the intimidation factor. This book reminds me that I need to stop underestimating myself as a reader and continue to read boldly, not shy away from challenges (be they perceived or actual). That being said, it is definitely the kind of book you want to read in as few sittings as possible. Devouring great chunks of it in a single go makes sorting it all out a fairly simple matter. Had I read it in small installments over a longer period of time, I’m sure I’d have gotten lost in the swirl.

To wrap it up, I’ll just say this: I don’t like parties. They give me anxiety. And hosting one? Forget it, it’s my worst nightmare. Reading Gerald’s Party was the experience of reading a funny version of my worst nightmare amplified and exaggerated by roughly 1000x.

A truly unforgettable and unique reading experience. Highest possible recommendation. An easy 5 stars. Get it in your life.

[Nate D · Rating 3 out of 5]

The home, and a perfectly ordinary social occasion (or is it?) become an increasingly dire nightmare, kicked off by a murder, escalated by ordinary party mechanics turned ever more desperate and unreal. Coover's novel is one of those post-modern oddities that is arguably so extreme in formatting as to be much realer than realism. Here by concerning itself with every member of the party (there must be 50 or more named characters here and and Coover seems to know them all well: their motives, their personalities, their quirks, their hidden backstories. How actually far more unreal are those party scenes that manage to confine themselves to a single conversation, when, as here, any moment in such a crowd must necessarily be the interleaving of dozens of narratives and conversations (Altman got this too). So does the fact that the people remain so wrapped up in themselves in spite of everything happening really make this "unrealistic" given its extreme arguable naturalism? Well, yes and no. The increasing sensation of simulacra as the party is overrun by actors as it progresses eventually cuts off my ability to connect with the characters (not so in the beginning, but then my favorite party guest wound up dead) making this run towards strain and tedium at points.

And yet. There's a lot here the works exceedingly well. The the way in which Coover constrains this to one house, one party, for 300 pages is pretty amazing. I love the claustrophobia, the way the characters and house unfold, room by room, sub-scenario by sub-scenario, utilizing the full semantics of lived space. Or, well, most of it. There's always more I want done in this area. We never actually make it to one extremely relevant household space, for instance, though Coover is knowingly withholding it, suggestion here more powerful, presumably. Plus, the sort of real-time unfolding, though time is also completely destabilized. After the crime is discovered, the police collect the watches, cutting everyone off from the chronology, a sensation emphasized perfectly by the complete lack of page numbers. It's brilliant form-as-function -- without a bookmark, in this swirl of drawn-out and intercut interactions, I'd be as lost as the characters.

On the other hand, Coover is of that era of post-war modernists and postmodernists who knew that sex was the grand unifier that would give blood to intellectual construction. Sometimes at the expense of well-considered gender politics. As such, Robert "Spanking the Maid" Coover often wears a satyr's horns, undercutting the deep sadness that arguably lies beneath this novel with a flippant, sometimes problematic eroticism. It's a pose, of a kind, and he clearly has a great deal of empathy for his characters at other times, but still it can frustrate. At the same time, it works. Here this otherwise possibly unendurable exercise really does directly take on life and narrative momentum from its narrator's quest between twin poles of sex and death. At least until, as mentioned, that other main theme and great artifice, theater, overwhelms the action.

[John Sundman · Rating 1 out of 5]

Coover takes a minimally interesting premise--a cocktail party right out of a Hieronymus Bosch painting as the setting for a send up of the classic Agatha Christie "closed room" mystery--and beats it to death. I guess the meta-joke is that just as the hellish party is inescapable and goes on forever, the book is inescapable and goes on forever. Fortunately, however, the book is escapable-- you have only to stop reading.

Certainly Coover deserves some style points for verbal skill and unrestrained imagination. The book is finely crafted, in the sense of the interlocking stories & themes, the literary allusions & wordplay, etc, etc.

But it's pointless and ugly. Why would I want to read a thirty page "joke" about a stopped toilet and skating over a vomit-covered floor? How much necrophilia is "enough" for one avante-guard novel?

It might have been an interesting and perhaps disturbing story at 50 pages. But at more than 300 pages, it's just a bore.

[Melanie · Rating 2 out of 5]

In an attempt to tie up the year's loose ends, I decided it was time to return to, and finally finish reading the last thirty pages of, Gerald's Party.

I was using a train ticket as a bookmark.

The ticket was dated January 4, 2009.

That's my review of Gerald's Party

[Heronimo Gieronymus · Rating 5 out of 5]

Very, very deep now into a Coover completist kick, it strikes me as worth noting that though the master is well-understood as a postmodernist at play in the realm of extant forms and as a wild, comic maven in love w/baroque mischief-making, he is insufficiently appreciated as a peerless artist of the obscene. GERALD'S PARTY could well serve as a rousing Exhibit-A for any huckster wishing to launch an investigation into this claim. It is through and through a malevolent, obscene novel. Now, I am the furthest thing from a prude. I am incapable of being appalled by a novel. However, I am more than capable of being awed by a largesse of runaway prurience. And I am awed by the horrifying places Coover can take me, and the counterintuitive goodwill he appears to extend in so doing. To call GERALD'S PARTY merely bawdy is to fall egregiously short of adequately appraising its profoundly discomfitting diagnoses. One is obligated to approach this work as one locked in an engagement w/ the power and possibility of exaggeration. Our world, the one we basically operate in, is sufficiently indexed by this novel that its exaggeration of the carnal and destructive in our workaday lives is able to command status as a brutish, piercing judgement. Scoundrel, know thyself! This is Coover's most biblically belligerent novel, appearing steadfastly committed to taking no prisoners. Many will not wish to take this trip to terminus. Woe unto them. But who could blame them? Sex and violence, worked into our very helices, in no small part define us, they are indeed the repressed of the domestic scene, but we are not used to having these forces unleashed in such a way, and we are certainly not used to this level of abhorrence played at this level of comedy. There are many chortles here, but, by God, many of them ought catch in the throat. It is too easy to see GERALD'S PARTY as another postmodern intertext, this one playing on the parlor drama / murder mystery, but that only works at the most abstracted theoretical level (there is a detective on the scene, but he is more nightmare Borges than pomo Poirot); what this thing is doing page-to-page is way off in another realm. It is we who are obscene. The obscenity that we are - as detailed w/ full-frontal shock-and-awe caprice in this delightful, harrowing novel - exists in concert w/, and not despite, what is fundamentally high-mided in us. So we find in this novel a combination of dreadful sin unleashed and persistent questions ontological, epistemological, and relating to the higher categories of aesthetics. We grapple w/ time, the domain of theatre, truth, beauty, identity, love. And we do so as we gorge ourselves in the most beastly manner. GERALD'S PARTY is a vertiginous (and vertigo-inducing) highwire act. It does extraordinary things (inside and outside parentheses) to evoke radical, cascading, sensory, many-partied simultaneities. There is a huge cast and it is careening about in cosmic free-fall. I can only imagine how exhausting and laborious a book this must have been to write. Probably Coover's most exhausting and laborious. And you have to go a little mad to give birth to such a Golem. Literary immortality is made of such undertakings, and Coover is as deserv'd of it as any American author. And he outdoes himself here, though, sure as shit, it ain't pretty. A blundrbuss. A cuss'd masterwork. I wonder if Darren Aronofsky read it before he made his comparatively chill MOTHER!

[godyahc · Rating 5 out of 5]

Gerald’s Party is a hallucinatory, darkly comic novel that transforms the domestic cocktail party into a grotesque carnival of sex and violence. Part slapstick farce, part philosophical meditation on social ritual, it takes an ostensibly harmless gathering and warps it into something nightmarish and unsettling.

The book starts off innocently, but the discovery of Ros, a beloved yet unsuccessful actress who has been stabbed to death on the living room floor, throws the night into chaos. What’s disturbing is how little it changes the atmosphere of the party. The guests keep eating, drinking, flirting, and gossiping, their appetites barely slowed by the presence of the corpse. Even those most shaken by Ros’s death eventually fall back into the twisted rhythm of the party. Other guests soon meet violent ends, and their fellow partygoers respond with everything from deep grief to eerie indifference. Combined with the novel’s overtly psychosexual themes, this glassy detachment creates an atmosphere that feels surreal, almost as if some ancient evil is simmering beneath the surface.

The police eventually arrive, but their investigation is a parody of procedure - ineffectual, invasive, and sinister in its own right. Rather than restoring order, they turn out to be as untrustworthy and deranged as the guests they’re interrogating.

Coover populates the story with exaggerated archetypes: the genial but unfaithful host, the dutiful housewife, the all-knowing detective, the overbearing mother-in-law. Beneath all the absurdist humor and cartoonish gore, the novel touches on something primal, showing how humans cling to pleasure, denial, and ritual even in the shadow of death.

Gerald’s Party is fragmented and disorienting but that’s exactly the point. For those willing to endure the chaos, it is a darkly comic, thought-provoking meditation on the absurd theater of social life.

[Andrew Sare · Rating 4 out of 5]

Funny thing how the brain works. Because this book is well written my brain kept trying to rationalize its events asking: how did this happen or that happen. Is it a dream? A dystopia? I'd say evidently its absurdism, its not meant to be something that could happen, but it does try to trick to to do something that is ultimately unachievable.

Its also a mockery of the 60s-70s partying lifestyle. They partied back then.

[David · Rating 4 out of 5]

This book gets designated the second I've read within about six weeks to include a sex scene in a cave atop a pile of human bones. (It is times like these that really force a person to question their own taste.) There's a lot to recommend here. The Bosch comparison is right on, and if you're interested in The Garden of Earthly Delights, I'd give this a try, which is another way of saying it has got a lot of graphic sex, graphic violence, and people eating some really nasty food, all taking place in a nowhere land with fascinatingly bizarre social mores. I wouldn't call it misogynistic as a below reader did; it's clearly a male sexual fantasy, and everyone in it is too self-centered to be actually hateful. There are a lot of great set-pieces here, with the excruciatingly long ass-wiping scene nearing near the top, along with the genitalia severing and pretty much everything said or done by the Inspector and by Ros. The problem, for me, was that most of those peaks come early, and 300 pages is a very long read for something that's mostly plotless, especially with awkwardly integrated philosophizing getting more and more prominent as the book went on. But come on, if I can't sell you on a book with a 20 page ass-wiping scene, I don't even know why you read books.

[Dave Christopher · Rating 4 out of 5]

A warped fever dream of a book. I couldn't put it down. I often think of re-reading it, but am not sure I want to go "back there" -- the world it creates is uncomfortably dark (but hysterically funny).

[Steve · Rating 5 out of 5]

What a rollicking nutball good time!

[Zack · Rating 5 out of 5]

For some reason I've never got around to reading as much Coover as I feel I should have. SPANKING THE MAID when I was in high school, other shorter bits and pieces . . . Finally got around the GERALD'S PARTY and I'm kicking myself for not getting into his novels sooner. This is such an utterly brilliant piece of multi-layered work words (other than the exact ones the book itself is composed of) will not do it justice. "Sublime" is as close as I can come. This isn't one of those nearly opaque literary exercise novels either. Not even close. Abundant Shakespearean/Joycean wordplay aside, this thing has so many scenes of such beautifully rendered slapstick it's capable of punching the same funny-buttons the Marx bros and W.C. Fields did at their best. I am truly a Coover convert now. Splendid novel by a splendid writer.

[Jean-marcel · Rating 3 out of 5]

A really long and sometimes painful account of the worst party ever. it's pretty funny though, I have to admit. And it goes on and on and on and there are no chapter breaks and stuff just kind of happens. There's murder and mayhem but the party just grinds on anyway. I think it's supposed to leave you feeling exhausted and completely desensitized, like the guests at just such a party. You can try experiments while reading like flipping to random pages or looking for phrases or characters names (easy if you're reading electronically!) and just reading on from there. I don't know, it's the only Coover I've managed to sort of get into as his short stories seem really obtuse. Worth a look at least, and a few snorts of laughter.

[Steven Felicelli · Rating 3 out of 5]

The Exterminating Angel with carnage and fornication.

[Francesca · Rating 1 out of 5]

I want to rate this book 0 stars. It was disgusting. I don't care about the "complex mystery" or "detailed plot" this book does not respect women. It doesn't respect men much, either, but women are seen as sexual body parts and that's all. Everyone's gross but men are controlling. Women are sexy. Sure, "its the time" but this book has aged poorly. I would not recommend this book to anyone.

[Conner]

That shit was crazy idk how to rate it there’s a lot happening that I definitely didn’t understand and that’s okay

[Leftjab · Rating 3 out of 5]

Or the art of parties. Not sure what to make of this one. Full confession – I never took a literature class in college so my reading of something like this – without a background of the classics or anything to turn to – leaves me feeling a bit inadequate. My only referents (if that is even what Coover is asking of the reader – I kinda think not - though I feel like I’m missing some major element that might make this snap into clarity. Is there some hidden “story” or something behind the party?) would be other books I’ve read, and my reading would lead me to other authors with whom Coover is grouped. The style of it reminded me of the orgy-esque scenes in Gravity’s Rainbow and then in general put me in JR mode – like I shouldn’t necessarily pore over every sentence looking for the meaning, but should read it as if I’m at the party – quickly, with all of the voices becoming a cacophony of drunken party noise. The “characters” besides Gerald don’t have much character beyond their naming – some seem a bit more drunk than others, the women get the short shaft in general being either objects of affection (like Alison) sexual objects (the daughter Sally Ann who wears patches with ever-changing phrases on them on her pants) or murder victims (Ros). Gerald’s wife (no name!) has more personality but she largely disappears from the novel for I figure at least 200 pages – Gerald seems to be either avoiding or looking for her, catching glimpses of her making drinks or hors d’oeuvres in the kitchen.

I was reminded several times of Darren Aronofsky’s unjustly maligned Mother! (cross-bred with Bunuel’s The Exterminating Angel) – the dreamlike sense carries over here, as Gerry is bombarded by drunken party guests who change identities at a moments notice. The house is undefined beyond living rooms, bathrooms, kitchens – there’s a jaunt outside to piss on the side of the house. The book has some stretches of scatology (people do go to the bathroom at parties) and pornography (Gerry’s reconnection with his wife – after his dalliances throughout with many of the other guests – culminates in an extended sex scene) which made me think of something like Venus in Furs or The Torture Garden, and how none of the characters seem to really have much going on under their naming (and their intoxication) felt a bit like Ballard’s Crash – everyone is reduced to a voice and baser instincts.

I’m fluctuating on my rating here because I did read it pretty quickly and I guess I was looking for some sort of revelation as to why Coover would choose to tell this story. I’d read very little of his before – “The Babysitter,” started both Origin of the Brunists and The Public Burning but in both cases the Day got in the way and I didn’t get very far. Gaddis in JR repeats something like “what America’s all about” and I definitely got some inclination as to why he was writing in his style for that extended novel. Coover doesn’t give the reader much (unless as I said before, what he was giving me I wasn’t prepared to receive?) and my cursory knowledge of his novels would lead me to think that while he could be very political (The Public Burning, A Political Fable) this didn’t seem political to me. Many of the guests were connected through the arts – theater, painting, television – and whatever “depth” hinted at seemed to be connected to how one processes the arts – the reader in this case participating in a work of art – a character asks Gerald after he murders someone (all of the murders & violence presented as being staged – part of a play at some point) “How do you feel about nihilism as a viable art form?” which felt like Coover throwing a bone to the reader (similar to Pynchon’s you want cause and effect. All right.) that the whole book was an exercise in aesthetic nihilism – that his reflections of the times (this is a mid 80s novel) was that whatever hope the 60s presented to novelists in terms of maybe America being the world as a better place dragged through the emergence of suburban life leading into the minimalist 80s, where a novelist like Coover who could in his most grandiose moments incorporate opera, stream-of-consciousness, fine dining, high and low culture, fairy tales, multiple narrators, cartoons, what have you – shrugging his shoulders and asking for what? What good does any of that do beyond make a pretty picture? And what’s left? The dinner parties. This could also be my projecting I’m well aware.

I guess in that respect I did see a kinship between Gerald’s Party and say Carpenter’s Gothic and Vineland, the writers coming out of the stoned wilderness to discover that art doesn’t really save the world and responding with a flattened, noisy reflection – leading to something like Less Than Zero (though I will admit when the television crew starts shooting and the theater director Quagg waves his cape around it reminded me of Z Man from Beyond the Valley of the Dolls – which has great party scenes to boot!). And even in terms of films how it drifts into theatricality – as if the whole thing is theater – reminded me of the film Madeline’s Madeline where the rehearsals become the performance….

But still, and my understanding anything is not a bearing on the quality of a novel or a film or a piece of music – some of what I love in reading is when I must push myself to attempt to understand something. I know there’s a book called Understanding Robert Coover out there and after finishing this I felt I should try to track down a copy but at the same time I’m not sure this is the best Coover novel to start with. His first one felt (akin to V) like a large canvas upon which to try to understand America (hey, religious cults seem to be big on our agenda) and then he had short stories and short novels that seemed to be working out various fictional ideas (again, I haven’t read these so this is based on the back covers) before writing the magnum opus of The Public Burning explicitly about American politics in the mid 70s. So then he turns to domestic concerns – parties that he throws for friends where maybe he has a few too many drinks and doesn’t totally remember what happened (we’ve all been there) and this suburban fantasy becomes captured as guests ask for more drinks and stuff up the toilet while our aging main character expresses his waning libido amongst all the female party guests. I just finished the novel and am noticing its style is rubbing off on my writing here.

As with JR, I feel there could be a chart of all the characters and (I would hope) that how they are all related would hold some sort of water – that there is an architecture to the novel, that Coover’s playing fair as opposed to something like Naked Lunch where I don’t feel like there is an architecture, just a collection of surreal episodes loosely connected by characters who are really names on a page rather than characters. I swear that a character goes to sleep in page 1 or 2 and then wakes up around page 300 and wonders what happened to the party. There is a beat towards the end of the novel where Gerald is left alone (naked?) after having sex with his wife where he says something to the effect he was remembering why he had these parties and there’s a flash of the “Garden” which I would assume to be some sort of Garden of Eden (though that might be too much inference) where Gerald is watching some female figure run gracefully through a beautiful field before the dead guest from the first page (Ros) grabs his nuts and brings him right back down to earth. Is Ros the vision of the Garden he sees? And then it seems like Ros is being directed by an off-screen director (let’s try it again, from the top) which almost directs the reader to start the novel again and try to pick up what I missed the first time around.

One more thing – not quite sure about the subverting tropes of the murder mystery – I mean, yeah, Ros’s body is found on page 1 but there’s no sense of a whodunit – the body becomes something to party around, no consequences for death (but of course we are in a fiction, not in real life so Bob’s yer Uncle and is probably wanting more vermouth at this party) and the police just get in the way of the party. I did like Pardew’s digressions on time but I’d be lying if I could say what that has to do with what’s happening at Gerald’s Party. Art stops time? I could skip around, not necessarily reading the pages in order and the characters wouldn’t change because of that. I did think of the musicality of the book a bit – something like Coltrane’s Ascension which drifts into pure noise and then the voices of the instruments come together in something that resembled (to me anyway) something like a gospel performance. In Coltrane’s case aspiration to the spiritual, in Coover’s case… I don’t know. I don’t know.

[Scott · Rating 5 out of 5]

A Po-Mo murder mystery. Gerald is having a big party with many friends and people he doesn't know, when a body of a very "well known" entertainer is found dead on the floor. Craziness occurs in a very relaxed non-chalant manner. It is a very tough read, i mean very tough. Coover never states who says what piece of dialogue, with fifty or so characters in the book, and many around at each situation that is occuring, it takes a lot of effort to decipher who is saying the line. It took me a good two months reading in complete silence to finish this one. However i found it very rewarding to get through. I'll never read another novel like this for the rest of my life. And it was highly entertaining.

[Arvid Tomayko-Peters · Rating 4 out of 5]

absolutely bizzare, carnal, erotic, at the same time gross, ridiculous and absorbing and it puts you right THERE. Made a piece of music based on some excepts of this book a few years ago after reading it in a class taught by Alvin Lucier - one of the greats of 20th century experimental sound art.

[Caroline]

Couldn't get past the first 30 pages. Too slow and seemingly pointless in its painstaking detail to keep my interest. I get that that the excruciating detail is the point in the experiment of this novel, but it just too excruciating for me.

[Matt Willis · Rating 2 out of 5]

I think I was aware of what the author was trying to do do with this book, but it was SO dense with no chapter breaks and unannounced characters just butting into conversations throughout, that I had to give up at about the halfway point.

[Souva Chattopadhyay · Rating 3 out of 5]

Brilliantly crafted emptiness! It focuses too much on formalist extravaganza, so typical of post-war American Literature, to entirely underplay the potential contemplation on space and time which, supposedly, the book is centered on.

[Lily]

I just could not get into this book.

[dragynlady · Rating 3 out of 5]

This was a gri and depressing story, though well written. Drunken irresponsible behavior by adults.

[Rachel · Rating 1 out of 5]

Ew.

I don't have much else to say.

(I can read Bataille without blinking, but somehow this disgusts me?)