''Gerald's Party'' is the fourth novel written by

Robert Coover Robert Lowell Coover (February 4, 1932 – October 5, 2024) was an American novelist, Short story, short story writer, and T. B. Stowell Professor Emeritus in Literary Arts at Brown University. He is generally considered a writer of fabulation ...

, published in 1986. The book encompasses a single night at a party given by the title character and narrator, Gerald. Though the murder of a beautiful actress is central to the plot, Coover's text has little in common with a traditional murder mystery. He appears to be approaching the murder mystery genre with the goal of subverting/exhausting its possibilities. A comparable strategy can be seen in his retellings of fairy tales (see ''Briar Rose'', ''A Child Again''), and his reframing of movie conventions (''Ghost Town'', ''A Night at the Movies''). Like most of Coover's works, this is experimental fiction. The text regularly returns to themes of sex, violence, and a blurred boundary between theatre and reality.

Plot introduction

As Gerald tries to describe the things around him in painstaking detail, he recounts simultaneous conversations and events as they happen by using a format similar to

data packet In telecommunications and computer networking, a network packet is a formatted unit of data carried by a packet-switched network. A packet consists of control information and user data; the latter is also known as the '' payload''. Control inform ...

handling. After describing a small part of a situation or a conversation, he moves on to a small part of a different conversation, then returns to the first conversation, or maybe moves on to a third or a fourth, returning each time to try to be as accurate as possible while recording the events.

Major themes

The tone of the novel is humorous, and there are many puns,

double-entendre A double entendre (plural double entendres) is a figure of speech or a particular way of wording that is devised to have a double meaning, one of which is typically obvious, and the other often conveys a message that would be too socially unacc ...

s, jokes, sight-gags, and deliberate ironies. There are also graphic depictions of various bodily functions, including different types of sexual intercourse. Gerald, speaking in what could be described as

stream-of-consciousness In literary criticism, stream of consciousness is a narrative mode or method that attempts "to depict the multitudinous thoughts and feelings which pass through the mind" of a narrator. It is usually in the form of an interior monologue which i ...

, often appears unaffected by the decadent and orgiastic events that surround him, and, in addition, he comes across as an

unreliable narrator In literature, film, and other such arts, an unreliable narrator is a narrator who cannot be trusted, one whose credibility is compromised. They can be found in a wide range from children to mature characters. While unreliable narrators are al ...

References

1986 American novels American crime novels Novels with unreliable narrators Novels set in one day {{1980s-crime-novel-stub