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A WRITER'S WIT
Most of the time I feel stupid, insensitive, mediocre, talentless and vulnerable—like I'm about to cry any second—and wrong. I've found that when that happens, it usually means I'm writing pretty well, pretty deeply, pretty rawly.
Andre Dubus III
Born September 11, 1959

New Yorker Fiction 2016

Jason Ford

September 12, 2016, Robert Coover, “Invasion of the Martians”: While in the middle of a three-way with a young woman and the female Secretary of the Interior, a US senator from Texas must return home, where Martians have landed their spacecraft. ¶ When he attempts a certain diplomacy—never mind that they speak no language—they apparently shoot his dick off (a whooshing flashlight, very clean, no blood). Perhaps only a man of Coover’s age could write such a story, in which the US’s best retaliation is to nuke the Martians (voicing fear leftover from the 1950s?). The Senator’s younger paramour indiscreetly reveals the Senator’s delicate condition [“Nothing but a pimple!" (68)] on TV, and he must appear on a late-night show to expose the truth about his member (a word used more than once). Perhaps the author’s solution to the Senator’s problem reflects a subliminal message from his aging libido: what good is it to me now anyway? And perhaps he is satirizing more fleshly squabbles the US is having over aliens, particularly along the Mexican border—where there seems to be no communication and annihilation is threatened. Coover’s novel, Huck Out West will be released in January.
Illustration by Jason Ford.
 
NEXT TIME: New Yorker Fiction 2016

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