Matinee by Robert Coover, 2011
The magic trick:
Droste Effect
You will realize a minute or two into your “Matinee” reading experience that Mr. Coover has a funhouse mirror of a story for you.
I had to look up the term – I didn’t know it offhand but it’s called the Droste Effect. It’s very cool. I previously had referred to this technique in the more colloquial and perhaps-more-local-to-Cincinnati-term of “oh you mean it’s like a bag of Grippo’s then.”
Anyway, this is a story within a story within a story and so on.
And while I think that is very cool, there is something a little bit … I’m not sure. Indulgent, maybe? It feels like, as a reader, you’re being pressed upon to be impressed. Like someone telling you a story at a party that demands your “No way! Really?” series of exclamations throughout.
That’s not a fun experience.
So, yes, I was wary when I realized this story was that kind of story.
But, jeez if the old Coov doesn’t just pull it off anyway. Yes, it’s indulgent. Yes, it’s maybe even obnoxiously indulgent. But the stories folding in on themselves are done in such a way to totally disorient the reader – even as you know what’s happening. Good luck sorting out which is which and who is the assumed perspective. It’s a mess of possible points of view. The result is dazzling. Begrudgingly dazzling. I’ll admit it.
And that’s quite a trick on Coover’s part.
The selection:
Alone at home, he watches this old film, imagining that it is he who rises from the third row as the movie-house lights come up and, as he lifts his hat and coat from the adjoining seat, catches a glimpse of the sorrowful woman four rows back, who seems to be tearfully staring at him. A sourceless music rises, throbbing, as though from out of their shared gaze. As the man in the film pulls his coat on and starts up the aisle toward where he and the woman will jostle each other, intentionally or accidentally or as if both compelled to so collide, it’s purposefully ambiguous, he also dons his coat—he knows how the movie turns out—and heads off for a drink at the neighborhood bar, called there by what he feels to be his vocation to rescue sad maidens.
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