The Case for a Kindle: Robert Coover's Noir

A BULL review by Curtis Dawkins

I know three people who have Kindles, and while inmates such as myself are about as likely to gain access to Electronic Book Things as we are to have access to medical marijuana, the impossibility of an occurrence doesn’t mean I don’t waste time wondering whether or not, if given the chance, I would buy one. After studying Robert Coover’s author photograph every time I open his latest novel, Noir, I have decided that my decision to buy an E.B.T. would depend largely on whether the “books” come with author photographs.

99% of author photographs are absurd and as such, fun to ridicule. After six drinks, it’s how they fantasize others will think of them. The author looks pensively at the camera, or in the air, at some fixed point high or low, always tortured by their burden, by the things they have to say. ½% are straightforward records of what the person looks like, and these seem almost to say “I know, I can’t believe things finally worked out for me this once, either.” Robert Coover’s fits into another category altogether, the category I imagine Thomas Pynchon’s author portrait would fit into should he ever have one—the photo seems to be a construction of what Coover thinks someone like him might look like. The photo looks like a fiction. If I had to sink the photograph into something concrete and vaguely recognizable, I’d say: A sunglasses, toupee-wearing, anemic Burt Reynolds as a porn actor.

Before Noir, the only novel of Coover’s I’d read was Spanking the Maid, the story of which is explained perfectly by the title. I hadn’t thought about Coover in a long time until I recently read two amazingly, dizzyingly beautiful short stories in The New Yorker. The short stories are hard to explain, but worth seeking out for their almost magic ability to end up exactly where they began. They are far and away above the usual self-promoting vehicles masquerading as stories in most current fiction.

Noir is a detective story that is much more interested in itself as a homage to detective stories. Its private detective, Philip M. Noir, comes out only at night (invariably rainy), drinks and smokes constantly, and doesn’t mind when he has to wear his secretary Blanche’s panties. In an unnamed city in an unspecified year, a veiled widow comes to Noir wanting to find out who killed her husband. She has beautiful legs and ends up in the morgue. Or does she? When Noir goes to the morgue to investigate the body—naturally—the body’s gone.

There are dark forces at work: a vicious cop, Blue; an underworld puppet master, Mr. Big. There are bartenders, piano players and sexy lounge singers, shadowy characters that may be Noir’s friends or may be working for the other side. There are underground tunnels, hobos, and a donut shop that dispenses whiskey from the milk machine. These, of course, are stock characters used in all hard-boiled fiction, making every page of Noir drenched and sopping in the awareness that it is a detective novel.

The main criticisms of this, or any other postmodern work, is that there are no “real” characters to care about, nothing at stake in the way of a plot to hold the reader’s interest. It’s true of Noir: there is a care-bones claustrophobic feel to the atmosphere. The reason for this, or perhaps an explanation, is given by Blanche near the novel’s end: “I have found, Mr. Noir, that if you make up a story with gaps in it, people just step in to fill them up, they can’t handle themselves.” 

But I like this book. I like seeing it on my little desk, as much for its spare aesthetics and physical presence as for the story inside. You can’t tell a book by the cover, or an author by his or her picture, but that is part of why we love them both. For some reason, I like looking at Coover’s picture. It’s oddly comforting, as if some dreamy idea of what I thought a writer would look like had been lured from his lonely cave, floor scattered with rodent skeletons, and captured forever on celluloid. Or maybe the author knew that a photographer was waiting outside, and sent someone else instead, someone invented.

Like people, books are more than the words inside. And I would miss that “more” if the book floated through the air to become a bunch of words on a hand-held screen. Does the Kindle weigh more after the book arrives? Could I give the book to someone else? For me these are futile questions, but still somehow relevant in my wonderings. Ultimately, I think if I even could change the way I read, I’d still stick with a good old book as I’ve always known it. Case of the not-even-remotely-possible Kindle closed.

Curtis Dawkins graduated from Southern Illinois University at Carbondale and earned an M.F.A. from Western Michigan University. Since then, he has worked in sales selling Saturns to people and casings to the meat packing industry. He is currently an inmate at the Michigan Reformatory in Ionia, Michigan.