Spanking the Maid

by Robert Coover

Book Overview

This spellbinding, impeccable novel tells the story of a master, his maid, and the irresistible ritual that binds them.

Each morning, the maid arrives in the master's bedroom with her cleaning paraphernalia, hoping to make this day's round of work the perfect one. Each morning, the master awakes from a half-remembered but recurring dream of knowledge and chastisement"the residue of which the maid, to her horror, finds each morning in his...

• Format: Paperback
• Language: English
• ISBN: 0802135404
• ISBN13: 9780802135407
• Release Date: December 1997
• Publisher: Grove Press
• Length: 102 Pages
• Weight: 0.34 lbs.
• Dimensions: 0.3" x 5.6" x 8.2"

Customer Reviews

Not an etude, but better

Taking a cue from Raymond Queneau's "Exercises in Style," and his own short stories featured in "Pricksongs and Descants," what would seem to be only an experiment develops into a real commentary on self-reference and post structuralism. Coover's treatment of the master-slave, dominant-submissive relationship serves to show the sado-masochistic exchange that exists in language when that language becomes "meta" language, or language about language. In this way all "criticism" is "criticized," begging the question: if meta language is sado-masochistic, what is meta-meta language?The novel also works despite its subject matter-- if Coover had chosen some other setting, one could still delight in the way he weaves repitition into an ongoing cascade, each permutation the same and wholly different. Chaos theory as literary genre? Now who's being sado-masochistic?

A comic-erotic send-up of Nouvelle Vague fiction

This elegant, concisely written masturbatory farce, in which similar scenes of a maid's transgression and a master's punishment are played out over and over again, conflates the delicious repetitive nature of erotic fantasy with a send-up of "Last Year at Marienbad"-type fiction--to an effect that is both erotically arousing and hilarious. Coover's greatest tour-de-force and a tiny, but original, masterpiece.