The Adventures of Lucky Pierre, Directors’ Cut,...

The Adventures of Lucky Pierre, Directors’ Cut, Robert Coover, Grove Press: 304 pp., $24

Is it a bad sign if there are seven words on the first page of a novel that you don’t exactly know the meanings of (in this case, “epiodion,” “sibilants,” “tenebrous,” “fricatives,” “piangevole,” “plainchant,” “embouchure”)? Is it beside the point? In Robert Coover’s case, no. A reader will never feel entirely comfortable reading a Coover novel, for Coover writes on the verge of meaninglessness. Coover writes for the mind’s eye, cluttering his pages with images and hypertext and familiar phrases. This is the place where the loop between irony and cliche is closed or begins eating itself, like the proverbial serpent and its tail. Other authors have played with a flow of verbiage, like the babble of insane shamans, but no other have stopped a reader dead every third word with images. In “The Adventures of Lucky Pierre,” it’s the sexual images, images that can’t help but be created as you read. This is not always pleasant, but writers like Coover, who teaches electronic and experimental writing at Brown University, work on a new textual frontier. “Lucky Pierre” is the story of a porn star living in Cinecity (the city motto is pro bono pubis, famous for a certain part of his anatomy, sex slave to nine muse-directors who place him in various roles and call it very high art. There is absolutely nothing from this novel that can be quoted here. The thread of the story line is so tenuous that its comprehension depends more on the reader’s imagination than is the case with more conventional fiction.

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The Forgotten Founders: Rethinking the History of the Old West, Stewart L. Udall, Shearwater/Island Press: 276 pp., $25

Stewart L. Udall, congressman from Arizona from 1954 to 1961, secretary of the Interior from 1961 to 1969, author and attorney thereafter, has a new way of looking at the history of the American West. Where others see conquest, a test of wills between man and nature, the primitive plundering of the Gold Rush and the violence of the movie version of the Old West, Udall sees in the stories of largely unknown individuals a history of cooperation, community building, loyalty, love for the land and gentleness. Udall looks first at three Native American cultures -- the Iroquois, the Cherokee and the Pueblo, then at his own people, the Mormons. Udall’s great-grandfather was John D. Lee, the man who was executed for his role as a leader in the Mountain Meadow Massacre, a source of great pain for Udall, who has worked hard to bring the families from the two parties together and who finally believes that Indians were not involved with the group of Mormons that murdered the settlers from Arkansas, as historians have written. He looks finally at the overblown importance of the California Gold Rush in Western literature and then at the myth of the trapper as settler (trappers were by definition nomadic). He wants to “puncture” the old idea of Manifest Destiny, which argues that the pioneers were “agents of empire.” His is a quiet West, driven more by a need for religious freedom than by greed.

*

The Saints of Big Harbour, Lynn Coady, Houghton Mifflin: 328 pp., $24

Guy Boucher, a fatherless teenager from the boondocks of Nova Scotia, is surrounded by idiots: his alcoholic Uncle Isadore, a big man, a hero in his own mind, who wants to make a real man out of Guy (which makes Uncle Isadore an excellent hockey coach); a draft-dodging English professor (never has the book “Flowers for Algernon” seemed so beside the point); a mother who makes a living caring for other people’s children while her own play hooky; and various confused teenagers. One of them, Corrine, the town’s sweetheart, starts a rumor about Guy that turns an otherwise hilarious novel (in the style of Scottish writer Magnus Mills) into a potential tragedy. Few authors capture a rural teenager’s voice as successfully as Lynn Coady does. Feckless Guy is my hero.