In 2019, I got on a train to Providence, to meet Bob Coover. He whipped up to the curb outside the station in an early-gen, inexplicably light, Opel car. Such a mode of transportation seemed exactly appropriate for the man who was—though he’d balk at the title—America’s preeminent avant-garde novelist.
The door swung open; I got a “get in.” For several hours, we milled around town and hit upon a story that he thought might resemble a close future, Street Cop.
It was a closer future than we might have known. In Street Cop, a police officer-cum-small time crook rushes through the Capitol building. The building falls; it’s complete pandemonium. Art Spiegelman was illustrating Coover’s story when he turned on the news on January 6, 2021, and saw what Coover had written being played out before him. As Coover recounted to Art: “Yes, there are strange things that happen in my fiction. But strange things happen in the real world, too… When people ask me, I say that I learned my realism from Kafka.”
