Robert Coover: By the Book

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The postmodern novelist and author, most recently, of “Going for a Beer: Selected Short Fictions” likes to “save the fun stuff (writing and book reading) for after midnight.”

What books are on your nightstand?

“The Blue Guitar,” by John Banville, “The Accidental Mind,” by David J. Linden, “4 3 2 1,” by Paul Auster, several issues of Dædalus (currently reading the “Russia Beyond Putin” and “The Changing Rules of War” issues, but there are others in the stack) and “Zero K,” by Don DeLillo. Just finished Richard Powers’s brilliant “Orfeo.” Masterpiece.

What influences your decisions about which books to read? Word of mouth, reviews, a trusted friend?

Most reading has to do with what I’m working on. Presently, besides the above, it’s digital personal assistants, consciousness, street cop lives, updates on the quanta, alternate reality games, film tech and theory, killer drones and time.

Whose writing today most inspires you?

Past the stage of looking for inspiration. Now have to choose, trim, toss out, try not to get distracted by the disorderly but regret-inducing pile of inspirations past. There was a time, however, when almost everything I read, saw, heard or tasted was inspirational. Samuel Beckett inspired, Joyce did, Kafka, Dostoyevsky, Borges, Melville, my plate was full. It was the time of the rise of the “Boom generation” of Latin American writers, many of whom had not yet been translated or discovered: Cortázar, García Márquez, Onetti, Donoso, Asturias, Carpentier, Rulfo, Vargas Llosa, Fuentes. I devoured them all and reviewed many of them for the The New York Times Book Review.

What kinds of books bring you the most reading pleasure these days?

Mostly reading or rereading ancient texts, modernist authors I grew up with, new work by old friends, former or current students of quality and sometimes the authors they recommend. There is a lot of pleasure in good writing, but it is not for me the primary motive for reading.

Which genres do you avoid?

The conventional novel, only readable if the writing’s stunningly or quirkily great. On the other hand, sci-fi, detective novels, westerns, pornography, spy stories, horror and romance, though very conservative forms, are all more like folk and fairy tales, and so much more alluring to a writer trying to burrow inside the collective psyche.

How do you like to read? Paper or electronic? One book at a time or several simultaneously? Morning or night?

Prefer paper, having been born to it, but in truth I now spend most of my afternoon reading online. Read several texts simultaneously always, one thing leading to another. Save the fun stuff (writing and book reading) for after midnight, staying at it until about 5 or 6 a.m. Every day.

You taught writing for many years. What was your favorite book to teach? Do you have a favorite book about writing?

Didn’t think of it as teaching so much as conversations with other writers, often moved from classrooms into cafes, bars. Did teach a course from time to time called “Exemplary Ancient Fictions,” in which we worked our way from creation myths and the Gilgamesh epic through Ovid and medieval romance, writing our own fictions, touching on the various stages of the reading along the way (dream stories, animal tales, transformations, etc.). We also read imaginative contemporary writing (Calvino, Carter, Borges, Elkin, Merwin, etc.), so we didn’t always reach, before semester ended, my favorite text, “La Celestina” (aka the “Tragicomedy of Calisto and Melibea”), probably by a converso Jew named Fernando de Rojas, a beautifully complex 15th-century work that gave rise to both the Golden Age in Spanish drama and the birth of the novel. Best book in the language after Cervantes’s “Don Quixote.”

“On Being Blue” and “Willie Masters’ Lonesome Wife,” by William Gass, are disguised as novellas, but both are really books about writing, my favorites. His more traditional essay collections — “Fiction and the Figures of Life,” for example, or “Habitations of the Word,” “A Temple of Texts,” “Life Sentences,” etc. — are also must-reads for young creative writers and scholars. We made a trip out to St. Louis during the fateful election season last year to see Gass (also to give a reading of my fable “The Cat in the Hat for President,” to be republished in April, but that was only a sidebar), marking a friendship of more than half a century, to tell him what a fine youthful book his new collection of short fiction, “Eyes,” was. He died, alas, too soon after.

What book might people be surprised to find on your shelves?

“Watchmen,” by Alan Moore, along with Joe Sacco’s reports from the front line, R. Crumb’s “The Book of Genesis,” and a few other graphic novels. Once had similar ambitions.

If you could require the president to read one book, what would it be?

He’s basically illiterate, can’t handle more than 140 characters at a time, and is tied up now with “Mein Kampf.”

You’re organizing a literary dinner party. Which three writers, dead or alive, do you invite?

Limited to three, I’d bring back John Hawkes, Angela Carter and Stanley Elkin, missing them sorely as close friends and frequent dinner companions. But there were many others with whom I’ve broken bread — Harry Mathews, Carlos Fuentes, Susan Sontag, Sol Yurick, Williams Gass and Gaddis, for example — and, if there were room at table, they’d all be welcome, too.

Of the books you’ve written, which is your favorite or the most personally meaningful?

“Gerald’s Party” and “John’s Wife.” Both grew out of “Pricksongs & Descants.” “Gerald’s Party” began as an effort to write a book length pricksong, piling in all the narrative ideas I had back then. Some got left out and new ones were invented, so I wrote “John’s Wife” as a kind of formal sequel, titling it, like “Gerald’s Party,” with a proper noun in the genitive, plus a common noun. Again, there was a lot of residue. I like trilogies (a life is one), and wish I had the strength and time to finish a third. May start one, just the same. Already have the title, if little else.

Who would you want to write your life story?

Samuel Beckett. It would be funny and mercifully short.