While reading this novel it occured to me on more than one occasion that I was very happy that this wasn't the first Coover book I'd read. This work is so very different than his fairy tale making-and-breaking works that require new maps to navigate his fictional terrain; The Origin of the Brunists is a story told in a Coover voice unfamiliar taking those other works into account - and yet charged with enough voltage to remind the reader that everything here is third rail. By the last 20 pages o...

Excellent. Does not need a review from me, as plenty exist already. Interestingly was much more about the lostness of the disenfranchised, poor, high-unemployment etc community as a "why" than about satirizing religious cults than expected, which is a good thing. *********From the official statement made by The Family of Love (previously known as "The Children of God") in the 80s: "In part as a response to the sexual liberality of the early '70s, Father David presented a more intimate and person...

Ever heard of the Cobden Appleknockers? Doubt it, but betcha they are figured in half way to make up 'West Condon the location where this straight-up told story takes place and West Frankfort, IL the sight of a coal mine explosion in 1951 the other half. It's southern Illinois where Coover came of age, is backward and peckish wholly persuadable to religious fanaticism that grounds this tale. He's got his characters down zand spins a broody web of occult and cultish intrigue with some small town

During the mine disaster that is the proximate cause of the formation of the eponymous cult, several miners “considered bratticing off” (48)—building a partition for self-preservation. The significance herein however arises when the cultists are “attacked on one side by violent powers of darkness, reviled on the other by a thickening mass of ignorance and prejudice, and even, as some feared, threatened from within by subversive or weakhearted elements” (294). They decide in response “to brattice...

In the novel, a small town, West Condon, is tossed into a frenzy when Deepwater Number Nine Coalmine collapses. Scores of lives are lost. Families torn apart. Religious congregations are forced to reorder hierarchy. Newspapers, unions, mystics, out-of-towners: they all want to be able to define the disaster on their own terms. Meanwhile, the city of West Condon suffers and tries to cope.Filling the void of disaster is a rare moment in which a community can forge a new identity. It’s made far eas...

Vince had always imagined God as a tough dark old bastard who lived a good ways off, but had a long rubbery arm, spoke street Italian, gave the sonsa-bitches their due, and for some inexplicable reason had a particular fondness for Vince. His vision hadn’t changed much, except he was beginning to suspect God maybe had come to lump him in with the sonsabitches. The Origin of Brunists begins with a coal mine collapse in West Condon (as best I can tell, a town that is entirely the invention of

A long-time fan of The Universal Baseball Association: Henry J. Waugh, Proprietor (which I first read in 1969 and twice since), I have only just now read my second Coover novel—his first—The Origin of the Brunists. Big mistake to have put it off so long!Coover’s novel is a brilliant, bravura tour de force, a portrait of the people, the community, and the zeitgeist whose confluence generates a Christian splinter group, one based on a millennialist vision of final days. If such a description sound...

Left Behind It was Grace that taught my heart to fearAnd Grace my fear relieved-The town of West Condon, “a mote on the fat belly of the American prairie,” like grace, is inescapable. It, like God, “is utterly remote from anything human.” The place traps its inhabitants, mainly underground, with no hope except in either religion or beer. Located in the approximate centre of the continent, the place is America in microcosm: a country of continuous competitive tension with one’s neighbors, one’s c...

What does it take to invent a new religion? The recipe is rather simple – you need a good share of stupidity, a handful of psychos and crazies and a lot of hype and mass hysteria…Miller perceived existence as a loose concatenation of separate and ultimately inconsequential instants, each colored by the actions that preceded it, but each possessed of a small wanton freedom of its own. Life, then, was a series of adjustments to these actions and, if one kept his sense of humor and produced as many...

The origins of Cooverism are obscure. Its origins are obscured in the manner of having no predictive power of what is to come; it is not a V to its Gravity’s Rainbow, more The Floating Opera to its LETTERS. With the exception of a single fantastic chapter depicting a drunken card game we experience no linguistico-verbal pyrotechnics. We have no flavor of 1960’s postmodernism, the thing Coover made happen. Nothing metaphictional beyond the minimal quantity present in all fiction. The strange thin...

An easy 5. Perhaps, more to come...or not.

Robert Coover today "teaches electronic and experimental writing at Brown University". My general impression of Brown University's English Department comes from an alumnus friend of mine, who majored in English, but holds a grudge the size of Coover's forthcoming 'Wrath of the Brunists' against his school. He sums it up with a story about the end of one particularly painful, particularly Brownist English course: the professor (not sure who) asked if anyone had any questions; a well-respected wom...

I loved this book. I'm going to read the sequel, The Brunists' Day of Wrath, when it comes out in 2014 from Dzanc books -- I don't want to wait until March, so close on the heels of finishing the original novel, but well, I suppose I don't have much of a choice in the matter. As the book blurb on the back cover notes, The Origin of the Brunists won the William Faulkner Foundation Award for Best First Novel, but imho, it certainly doesn't read like a first novel.At its heart, the book is an acco

Robert Coover is a vanguard figure in the realm of postmodern literature: an old man now (obviously), clever, white, with streaks of misogyny I try to let pass as product of his time. (People actually pinched bottoms and thought it was ok?) I've read a few books from his latter years, abandoned one or two, never quite warming up to RC's oeuvre but understanding and respecting his place in the whole scheme of letters and weird book writing. Origin of the Brunists is Coover's first novel, however,...

**SPOILERS**The Origin of the Brunists is based on real mine explosion in Illinois known by author Robert Coover, which he uses as the basis for a full-fledged account of the origin and growth of a fundamentalist cult in small town Midwestern America. In this first novel of his, Coover takes readers on a dense and dark journey, using slow, subtle building of the narrative terror and hysteria to show the devastating and destructive impact that uncertainty can have on people. It revolves around th...

I usually don't go near first novels. I leave them alone. They suffer from being over written and often have an over wrought quality that I really detest. "The Origin of the Brunists" has had many favourable reviews. It was published in 1966 and has had many reprints. The author has a good reputation and has had many other novels and works of non fiction published. The subject matter of the novel, a millennial cult, is the sort of thing that I have always found intriguing: just how did Jim Jone