Briar Rose & Spanking the Maid

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Robert Coover is one of America’s finest stylists, a master of elegant nuance, subtle intent and darkly subversive humour. His abiding theme, strongly discernible in these two wonderful novellas, is the gap that lies between our notions of the world and the world’s stubborn and consternating reality, and, further, the way in which that reality keeps on slyly asserting itself through the intricate elaborations of myth and fairy tale. A self-conscious artist, fully aware of his vocation and ruefully accepting of its demands, he is that rarest of things, a poet in an age of prose.

Nowhere is his artistry more in evidence, and the price it exacts more amply accepted, than in Spanking the Maid. Fashioned in the form of an eighteenth-century handbook of sado-masochist techniques —‘There are manuals for this’— it is a metaphor, exact and exhausting, of the long and painful process by which a work of art is brought into quivering existence. Any reader who cares to know just what it is like to write a novel will be well instructed here, and will come away from the experience suitably chastened, cheeks aglow from a lesson expertly administered.

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