Pricksongs & Descants


Pricksongs & Descants is a collection of short fiction by Robert Coover first published in 1969 by E. P. Dutton.
The volume includes “The Babysitter,” Coover’s most anthologized work of fiction.
The title refers to Medieval musical forms that are used here as a double entendre.

Stories

  • “The Door”
  • “The Magic Poker"
  • “Morris in Chains”
  • “The Gingerbread House”
  • “Seven Exemplary Fictions”
  • *“Prologue”
  • *“Panel Game”
  • *“The Marker”
  • *“The Brother”
  • *“In a Train Station”
  • *“Klee Dead”
  • *“J’s Marriage”
  • *“The Wayfarer”
  • "The Elevator”
  • "Romance of the Thin Man and the Fat Lady"
  • "Quenby and Ola, Swede and Carl”
  • “The Sentient Lenses”
  • *“Scene for Winter”
  • *“The Mildmaid of Salmaniego”
  • *“The Leper’s Helix”
  • “A Pedestrian Accident”
  • “The Babysitter”
  • “The Hat Act”

Background

Essayist and critic Thomas E. Kennedy describes two divergent literary trends that arose among American fiction writers of the 1960s. One is “objective fiction” that blends journalistic methods applied to fictional forms. Truman Capote’s In Cold Blood exemplifies this approach, as does Norman Mailer’s Armies of the Night. In this latter form, the author may identify him or herself explicitly as the narrator. Tom Wolfe’s “real-life” fiction, such as Bonfire of the Vanities and Hunter S. Thomson’s Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas represent subjective reportage that conflate “fiction and reality.”
In contrast to “representational” fiction a “New Fiction” emerged among writers who abandoned “conventional realism” for “blatant illusions.” Traditional “introduction-climax-resolution” plots were replaced with innovative non-linear structures. Notable early practitioners of this postmodernist approach are John Barth’s Lost in the Funhouse, Donald Barthelme’s and Robert Coover’s Pricksongs & Descants.
Critic Thomas Alden Bass, from a 1982 interview with Coover, reports: “Friends lent him a cabin up at Rainy Lake in Canada "where I wrote the stories about origins," Coover says, referring to.the pieces that later appeared in Pricksongs & Descants.”

Reception

New York Times literary critic William H. Gass describes the stories as “virtuoso exercises: alert, self-conscious, instructional and show-off” and ranking Coover among the finest innovative post-war writers who “wish to instruct us in the art of narration, the myth-making imagination.” Gass regards “The Babysitter” as “ one of the most impressive pieces in the book.”
Novelist and critic Joyce Carol Oates in The Southern Review informs readers that Coover’s Pricksongs & Descants is simultaneously “crude and intellectual, predictable and alarming not interested at all in creating old-fashioned worlds for us to believe in…he gives the impression of thoroughly enjoying his craft.”

Retrospective appraisal

Reviewer Hari Kunzru at The Guardian declares the Pricksongs & Descants “cemented Coover’s reputation, standing today as one of the landmarks of postwar American fiction.”
Thomas E. Kennedy writes: “Pricksongs & Descants is a work of pure genius…a book that on its own ought to guarantee a permanent place for Coover in American letters.”