A career retrospective should highlight the traits you like best about the author in question. Going for a Beer actually had the opposite effect on me: reading it made me realize how much I have overrated Coover in my memory. Looking back at my reviews of his books (such as here, here, and here), I see that I've always recognized his weaknesses. When I thought of him, though, I always remembered his energetic, entertaining, and humorous prose style.
It probably demonstrates the strength of first impressions. The first thing I ever read of Coover's was "The Babysitter," whose "destabilizing brilliance" is particularly eye-opening when you come across it in an anthology of more traditional stories. It is also a distillation of everything Coover does best: combine multiple perspectives, blur reality and fantasy, and show the impact of popular culture.
Nearly all of Coover's stories are extensions of fairy tales or famous films: Snow White after the death of the evil queen, the Invisible Man falling in love with an Invisible Woman, the missing sex scene from Casablanca, the forest where the animals from Aesop's fables all live together. He makes explicit the implicit themes of sex and death in these stories. Coover's ideas are often clever, but he beats them into the ground rather than building on them. His humor is often sophomoric, with lots of sex and farting.
"The Babysitter" still holds up, and a handful of other stories also showed what Coover is capable of. I particularly enjoyed "The Return of the Dark Children," about Hamelin after the Pied Piper leads all the children away, although it lacks a satisfactory conclusion. Most of the stories, though, I found too long and too self-satisfied.
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