The Review of Contemporary Fiction

The Adventures of Lucky Pierre: Director’s Cut, by Robert Coover
reviewed by Robert L. McLaughlin

Robert Coover. The Adventures of Lucky Pierre: Director’s Cut. Grove, 2002. 405 pp. $24.00.

In Briar Rose (1996) and Ghost Town (1998) Robert Coover took two identity- and culture-defining narrative genres—the fairy tale and the American Western—and turned them inside out. The more ambitious Lucky Pierre takes on another such genre, pornography, treating it through the idiom of another culture-constructing form, cinema. The eponymous hero’s adventures consist of a series of erotic films, into and out of which he is perpetually falling, never sure when, if ever, he is in a real, noncinematic life. Taken together, these films trace the course of his life, from youth to old age; the history of film, from silents through classic Hollywood narratives to avant-garde; and a survey of film genres, as pornography is hybridized with South Seas adventure, slapstick comedy, Japanese monster movie, and dozens of others. The heart of all this is the exploration of identity amid these powerful cultural narratives. With no single narrative or even a single name (he has different names at different times in his career) to hold onto and with no sense of what around him is real and what illusion, Pierre is reduced to one defining trait: “He is he who ceaselessly desires.” Yet the objects of his desire are always externally generated, making him the identity-less puppet of an unnervingly ambiguous authority. In a rare moment of self-awareness, Pierre thinks, “it has trapped him inside a box of artificial light even as it pulled him in all directions at once and has given him no life, no center of his own.” This novel offers many outrageously funny, genuinely moving, and technically impressive sequences. Still, the overall effect of the repeated pornographic episodes is ultimately deadening; perhaps this is the point, but I suspect the novel could have been shorter without losing all that’s wonderful in it.