Another innovative writer has died. Beginning in the late 1960s, Robert Coover emerged as a star of metafiction—fiction rejects narrative conventions and realism. It uses language, style, and structure to point out the artificiality of itself.
Last week, I wrote about “To Whom It May Concern:” by another metafiction god, Raymond Federman. This week, Robert Coover, who just passed away at age 92.
I’ll always remember Coover’s short story, “The Babysitter,” which I discovered as a graduate student. This story has been widely celebrated, anthologized, and often taught in college writing and literature courses. However, in recent years, some have reviled the story for its depictions of domestic violence and sexual fantasies.
On its surface, the story has a simple premise: a young woman shows up at a suburban house to babysit three kids while the parents go to a party. What happens next is anything but simple or even normal in what you’d expect a short story to be.
“The Babysitter” breaks almost every rule writers are taught about short story writing, except for the most important rule: make the reader feel something. There is no single point of view, no focus on a primary event, no logical narrative progression. Instead, “The Babysitter” has many points of view. The babysitter, her boyfriend, the kids, the parents, and a general omniscient narrator all recount and conflate a series of events that may or may not be happening.
The boyfriend and his friend call the babysitter, then stalk the house, then enter and have sex with the babysitter. While at the party, the father fantasizes about the babysitter and finds an excuse to go home where he finds the boys with the babysitter. The mother is having a wardrobe crisis at the party. The kids are misbehaving and tickling the babysitter. The television is constantly on and the shows playing are described and the action blends with the story action.
There is a constant revision, refocusing, and contradiction of all the events. There is no way to know what’s really happening, or if anything is happening. The story is profound because it says something about how we experience: everything is filtered through our minds and imagination. And it’s profound because it forces us to think about how stories are put together, and how as readers we maintain a stubborn insistence on wanting to know “what really happened.” But because this is fiction, and written by Coover, nothing really happens—and everything really happens.
This story is worth reading for its uniqueness and its place in twentieth-century literature. Here’s a link to it (pdf), for free! But as well-known and well-regarded as this story is, I’m pretty sure it would never be accepted for publication today. If you read any contemporary fiction, you’ll understand why. I find this disconcerting.
