Whatever Happened to Gloomy Gus of the Chicago Bears by Robert Coover EPUB & PDF – eBook Details Online
- Status: Available for Free Download
- Authors: Robert Coover
- Language: English
- Genre: Novels
- Format: PDF / EPUB
- Size: 2 MB
- Price: Free
*Whatever Happened to Gloomy Gus of the Chicago Bears* is one of Robert Coover’s more obscure yet piercingly satirical novels, blending sports mythology with political allegory. Centered on a fictionalized version of Richard Nixon—here referred to by the ironic nickname “Gloomy Gus”—the novel explores the former president’s fall from grace through the lens of an alternate past, where he’s recast as a failed college football player turned failed politician. Coover weaves sports, scandal, and American myth into a grotesque tapestry of ambition, repression, and cultural absurdity.
The narrative is deliberately fractured, shifting between Nixon’s delusional interior monologue and surreal, often violent episodes that blur fantasy and memory. Coover’s prose is as sharp and irreverent as ever, using football not just as a metaphor for masculine ideals and national identity, but as a vehicle to expose the moral bankruptcy of power-hungry figures. Nixon, in Coover’s rendering, becomes a tragicomic embodiment of American decline—a man obsessed with order and legacy, yet lost in his own myth-making.
Though less well-known than *The Public Burning*, this novel continues Coover’s exploration of American iconography with characteristic boldness. It’s darkly funny, intensely critical, and steeped in paranoia, offering a complex meditation on failure, masculinity, and the disillusionment of the American dream. *Gloomy Gus* may not be Coover’s most accessible work, but it’s a potent and unsettling reflection of the cultural ghosts that haunt the American psyche.
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