Open House

One hundred floors above Manhattan, a diverse group of guests and gate-crashers come together in a luxurious penthouse. The down-and-out blend seamlessly with the well-to-do. Scammers find themselves the target of a con so long that by the time they begin to figure it out it’s too late to extract themselves. But what’s the occasion? Is it a party? A real estate listing? Or is there something else going on?

For over half a century, Robert Coover has been one of the most inventive and unpredictable writers in the American academy. Long heralded for his commitment to formal as well as technological innovation, with Open House Coover reminds readers that his work is as steeped in literary history as it is forward-thinking experimentation. This tension—between old and new, between a romanticized past and a future we only pretend we can predict—provides the animating tension to Coover’s latest metafiction, where narrative is at once the point and so beside the point that it calls into question all the myths by which we organize our lives. Imagine a cast of Chaucerian bawds caught in a Dantean maze and you have some idea what’s in store for you in this comedic nightmare about death, greed, art, and that most Cooverian of subjects—lust—rendered in all its ugly, erotic, banal, and mesmerizing forms.