‘In Bed One Night’ by Robert Coover

In Bed One Night by Robert Coover, 1983

The magic trick:

Creating an imaginative world that connects with very realistic themes

I may be totally wrong about this. I might not have read the right Coover. I might have missed the point. I may just be dense and dumb. But…

I just don’t like Robert Coover’ short stories very much. Sure, I thought “The Babysitter” was a thrilling bending of narrative timeline and truth. But the stories I’ve read since then? Annoying. Obnoxious. More trouble than they’re worth.

This is another to add to that list, at least for me. It feels like it was a really neat exercise for Coover to work through. Little to no punctuation! Free flow! One giant block of text! Can I actually pull that off?

Well, yes, yes he did pull it off. Here it is as a published, anthologized story.

So… congratulations?

What his little writer’s experiment does for us, the reader, I’m still not sure.

I got very, very little out of this story.

Again, maybe that’s just me.

Anyway, we can isolate it as an example of experimental fiction – neglecting punctuation in favor of flow.

And that’s quite a trick on Coover’s part.

The selection:

So one night he comes in from using the bathroom takes off his clothes stretches scratches himself puts on his pajamas yawns sets the alarm turns down the sheets crawls into bed fumbles for the lightswitch above him bumps something soft with his elbow which turns out to be a pale whitehaired lady in a plain gray nightgown lying in bed beside him wha – ?!

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