3.75 stars rounded up.My first Coover; and where to start? Well the title does give it away; it is an exploration of the Noir genre; send up, satire, tribute, a general culling of tropes. This is written in the second person which fits the type and the protagonist Philip M (M for Marlowe perhaps) Noir is suitably sleazy, drunk and beaten up on a regular basis. He has a smart secretary and a mysterious, veiled female client. The City is dreary, run down and mainly experienced at nights; there is

I wanted to like NOIR, but alas...NOIR is an attempt at a hardboiled detective novel. Actually more of a very strange caricature of the genre, a takeoff. I’m not sure how I feel about it. On the one hand, the prose is beautifully stripped down, stark, representative of the hard-boiled genre. The seldom-used second-person viewpoint pulls the reader into the story, right alongside protagonist Phillip M. Noir:This is what you love. The gumshoe game. Played alone on dark wet streets to the tune of t...

If you don't already get why it's such a great idea to narrate in 2nd person a book whose main character is named Philip M. Noir, referring to the reader in voice-over as "you" throughout, then this clever little knot of Cuisinarted crime cinema convention, plot, and cliche may not be for YOU...sweetheart.

The whole book was like one of those really messed up dreams you have when you've got a killer cold and take one too many nyquils before going to bed. But, you know, in a good way.

Have you ever finished a book and put it down thinking that you weren’t sure what exactly happened but that you kind of liked it? Such was my experience with Robert Coover’s Noir. Noir is nominally a mystery though it is surrealistic and amorphous one; much like a particularly vivid dream. This dream perspective is perhaps aided by second person narration that puts the reader in the drivers seat but neglects to provide them with steering wheel, gas pedal, or break.The narration elevates Noir to

Coover's book is more a meditation on the style of noir than a work of fiction in the style of noir. Coover's stylistic gymnastics--the rapid clipped sentence style, the poise of making the book appear in the readers mind in black and white--override whatever coherency we might desire from the plot. What's more, Coover takes an experimental style and infuses it with the jokes, darkness, and sex we expect from a noir tale, which is to say that as readers we turn the pages. Further, Coover leads u...

Bound: SunPost Weekly March 11, 2010http://www.sunpostweekly.com/2010/03/...Noir Sung BlueRobert Coover Gets with His Inner GumshoeJoHn HoodYou read a lot of hard-boiled fiction. Maybe even a little too much. The kinda little too much Cocteau called “just enough.” You cut your teeth on Chandler and Hammett and James M. Cain. Learned to crack wise through Mickey Spillane. You got your dark view of the world from Jim Thompson. Consider yourself an authority on Elmore Leonard. And you’ve spent a go...

Well, let's start with the basics - the book is not misnamed, it is in fact a work of noir, starring you (oh, the book is in second person), a detective named Phillip M Noir (middle name undisclosed, I'm guessing it's the obvious one though), working on a case for an attractive yet mysterious widow. Pretty much all tropes of noir - both cinematic and literary - are present, typically to hyperbolic excess. The book revels in the black and white, heavily shadowed, visual motif prevalent in the noi...

[9/10] She looked like trouble and the smart thing probably would have been to send her packing. But the rent has to be paid, you don't have enough business to turn down anyone. And besides, you like her legs. So, instead, even though you knew her story before you heard it, the inevitable chronicle of sex, money, betrayal (what the f__k is the matter with the world anyway?), you asked her to tell it. From the beginning, you said. Welcome to the Case of the Vanishing Black Widow, Robert Coover's

Nwah, Dahling!A modest, if twisted, homage to the classic roman noir designed and recommended for (the titillation of) heavy-thinking undergrad philosophy students (view spoiler)[the drama of cognition (hide spoiler)] and Playboy readers (view spoiler)[the melodrama of coition. (hide spoiler)]A Portrait of the Artist as a CulpritSoon after you first hung up your shingle as a private dick, a beautiful woman, far out of your league, climbed the stairs in her high heels and knocked coyly on your do...

From the very first sentence You are at the morgue, Coover's choice of second person narration* hits you like a bullet & the pressure never really lets up because the YOU never leaves you: the reader is made a witness, an accomplice. How many thrillers employ that?! But it works in this highly stylised cinematic take on the private eye experience ( or rather "eyeing the privates"! ), involving the readers in its immediacy and as we walk the hazy landscapes of seedy bars, wet slippery alleyways,...

When you read this book about Philip Noir, you really are going to get a hefty dose of literary type noir in the process. Let's take a closer look.Philip Noir is a private investigator. Using the word 'sleaze' to describe him is the understatement of the millenium, but he's a hell of a compelling character. He smokes, he drinks, he spends an inordinate amount of time in the city morgue, he hangs with the lowest of the low, he sleeps on his office sofa or in rain-soaked gutters, he is a proud, an...

I enjoyed the noir style of this with the familiar hip language & dry wit of a down at heel, grizzled PI. However I didn't see this as any different to a noir even though it purported to be deconstructing that. Yes there was a reflective metaphysical element, the PI really in search of himself, or the missing woman in his life, or in this case the ever-shifting city itself, which is referred to as 'she' and which he does make love to towards the end in a bizarre scene. The plot really doesn't ma...