An Outrageous Novel About U.S. Politics

It was a congressional aide, of all people, who clued me in to “The Public Burning,” Robert Coover’s magnificent novel about American politics, which is even more relevant today than when first published, to puzzlement and acclaim, in 1977. We were eating pastrami sandwiches on I Street in Washington, D.C., sometime during the hopeful early days of the Biden administration, and I asked the aide for a tip — one never just has lunch or a drink in Washington. Instead of conveying the latest piece of Capitol Hill gossip, as is the norm, he directed me to Coover’s classic.