Reviews provided by Syndetics

Library Journal Review

This novella is a revised version of the story of the same title originally published in the American Review (1975). Set against the background of the Depression and the political atmosphere of the Thirties, it recounts Gus's meteoric football career, his off-the-field sexual exploits, and his absurd death at a demonstration during the Republic Steel strike. As in other works, Coover is concerned with the problem of history and with our ability to order and control events. Gus, who lives purely in the moment, is ill equipped to survive in a world where Fascist and Marxist activists battle to shape history to their own ideological ends. Entertaining as well as thought-provoking, this hilarious book is essential for all fiction collections. Highly recommended. William Gargan, Brooklyn Coll. Lib., CUNY (c) Copyright 2010. Library Journals LLC, a wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution permitted.

Publishers Weekly Review

A notorious, former U.S. president is never mentioned by name, but certain similarities between him and the bizarre Gloomy Gus are too conspicuous to be overlooked. Both attended Whittier College in California; both were actors and debators; both played football, one as a sweatily ambitious but dismal failure, the other ultimately as a great halfback for the Bears. Gus is obsessive-compulsive to the point of madnessa ``freak'' and special kind of idiot. Coover integrates his portrait into this slender mythicizing novel of America in the Depressionof WPA arts-projects, the early days of the CIO, the historic Chicago Republic Steel strike and the police massacre of idealistic young men joining the doomed Lincoln Battalion to fight against Spanish Fascism. The evocation of time and place is strikingly accurate if gaudily eccentric, and the narrator, Meyer, a sculptor in welded metal, is a representative figure, as are other characters glimpsed in passing. The novel is a mosaic of brief glimpses, fragmentary scenesan extended, zany description of Gus learning the trade of football by rote, by memorizing the moves. But Gus lacks the essential, esthetic understanding of the great American gamethe subtle principle of ``balance,'' the very deficiency that would bring down that other Whittier alumnus 40 years later. (September 3) (c) Copyright PWxyz, LLC. All rights reserved

Booklist Review

Novelist Coover's latest short work goes over familiar territory but with a little less experimental and technical dash than in his recent A Night at the Movies; or, You Must Remember This (Booklist 83:750 Ja 15 87). This time the setting is Chicago in the 1930s, and the ostensible subjects include the Spanish civil war and U.S. labor unrest. But what Coover is really writing about is a familiar friend and nemesis, Richard Milhous Nixon, the hero of Public Burning (74:266 O 1 77). This time the ex-president is personified as a college football hero and stud whose successes on and off the field derive more from sheer determination than talent. Coover wallops his victim into a characteristically scatalogical climax, but the reader can't help wonder why the author is fighting a battle he's already won. JB. [OCLC] 87-2722

Kirkus Book Review

Originally published in the American Review (#22, 1975), now substantially revised, this novella-length story is a dense, juicy evocation of the 1930's radical-Left at its earthiest--and also (less convincingly) a satirical meditation on a cartoonish sociopolitical type: ""the perfect realist, the absolute materialist,"" the mindlessly programmed American Dreamer. The narrator, circa 1936, is Chicago artist Meyer, ""a lyrical socialist"" and ""Wandering Jew"" who's pondering his political commitment in the wake of the bloody Republic Steel strike. Meyer wonders about following his pals to fight in Spain: ""Since the bombing of Guernica a little over a month ago, I've felt I had to go, that I'd never work again until I did, but now, hunkered down beside these gleaming wet rails stretching subversively into the tunneled distance and feeling no pull on me, no pull at all, I'm not so sure."" He wrestles with his role as an artist: ""My Jarama flowers, fallen warriors, poised athletes, even my Gorky mask: how much is really a gift to the world, how much a pre-mediated theft of its substance?"" But mostly Meyer muses on the life of ""Gloomy Gus,"" the ex-Chicago Bears halfback and sometime WPA actor who was one of eleven demonstrators killed by police in the Republic Steel fracas. Gus was a man with ""nothingness"" at his center, having decided--as a gifted teen-age Renaissance man who'd failed at football and sex--to ""simplify himself,"" to master those ""two arts"" and forget everything else. He thus became ""the greatest lover and halfback in recent history""--but such a robot in the pursuit of scoring (""a walking parody of Marx's definition of consciousness"") that he came completely unglued, with career-ending results, when the Giants sneaked a girl onto the field. Coover tries to pack far too many ideas into the mythic, slapstick-y Gus figure: specific references make it obvious that, along with everything else, he's a Richard Nixon stand-in. So, as satire, this is often murky and occasionally (like other Coover fables) overdone. But the details and rhythms of Meyer's monologue are exuberant reminders of Coover's gifts for sheer language and voicing--which here (as elsewhere) overshadow his attempts at sociopolitical commentary. Copyright ©Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.