APF

Since The Public Burning, Coover has published numerous, consistently lively works of
fiction of various length (8 novels, including the mammoth sequel to The Origin of the Brunists,
The Brunist Day of Wrath, 7 novellas, and 3 collections of short fiction). While these books
never seem repetitive, they do return to a few obviously fruitful subjects—sports, fairy tales,
movies—and can certainly be taken as continued variations on the self-reflexive strategies
introduced in Pricksongs and Descants, Universal Baseball Association, and The Public
Burning. At times this strategy is more muted, as in Gerald’s Party, which seems more purely an
exercise in surrealism, while in other books the artifice is unconcealed, directly integrated into
plot and setting, as in The Adventures of Lucky Pierre.
Coover has also produced a series of novels and novellas that foreground their own
fictionality by presenting themselves as versions of a particular mode or genre of fiction. Dr.
Chen's Amazing Adventure is Coover’s take on science fiction. Ghost Town is a western, while
Noir evokes the hard-boiled detective novel (as filtered through film noir). Such works could not
exactly be categorized as pastiche, since they are not so much imitations as efforts to distill the
genre to its most fundamental assumptions and most revealing practices. Nor could they really be
called parodies, since the goal is not so much to spoof or ridicule the genre but to in a sense turn
it inside out, make it disclose the specific ways a particular mode of storytelling lends its
conventions toward motifs and typologies that in turn have worked to substitute themselves for
the actualities those conventions were created to depict, preventing anything resembling a clear
perception of historical and cultural actualities apart from these archetypal representations. In
novels such as Pinocchio in Venice and now Huck Out West, Coover takes this strategy of
metafictional mimicry a step farther by seizing upon a specific iconic text and reworking it, both
as a kind of homage to the prior work but also to create a parallel text that echoes the original
while it also sounds out the work’s tacit if partly concealed assumptions and elaborates on its
latent if unspoken implications.
Huck Out West picks up Huckleberry Finn’s adventures after he has indeed headed out to
the territories and taken up a life as an itinerant in the American West. Essentially a drifter, Huck
in this way fulfills the destiny inherent to his character as depicted in The Adventures of
Huckleberry Finn, where he is content to float his way down the Great River to no particular
destination beyond a loosely defined “freedom.” If the objective in Huckleberry Finn for both
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