Books: One-Man Circus

PRICKSONGS & DESCANTS, by Robert Coover. 256 pages. Dutton. $5.95.

In each and every one of his novels, The Origin of the Brunists and The Universal Baseball Association, Inc., J. Henry Waugh, Prop., the one and only Robert Coover performed brilliant literary acrobatics in the center ring. Now, with sleights of hand, desperate feints, chills and thrills, he impersonates the fat man and the thin lady, the magician pulling himself from a hat, the juggler, ringmaster, hall of mirrors.

Read this series of short stories and cringe in terror as a rusty poker turns into a man, into a prince, into a male member, into a gnomic lusting man-beast, revealing the subconscious fantasies of two invented sisters.

Perspire freely, ladeezandgentlemun, at death-defying acts of the imagination: a man is caught copulating with his dead wife and cries out at the loss of a book marker. Murder in a train station is erased when the stationmaster sets back the clock. An office worker outwits a homicidal elevator.

You young at heart, listen as "The Gingerbread House" is retold with a newfangled horror. Spellbound spectators, hear for the first time Noah's brother laugh, then rage, at the builder of the ark. And much, much more.

In an aside to Cervantes, the ringmaster unveils the secret of his own technical trickery, the warping of time, the myth turned real and reality fantasized. "Your stories also exemplified the dual nature of all good narrative art: they sallied forth against adolescent thoughtmodes and exhausted art forms, and returned home with new complexities." Although Coover is often tediously complex, there is a certain madness in his method that just as often delights.

Ah, do not be disappointed when the juggler drops the ball. It is the one that continues to rise that must be watched.