Heart Suit
Robert Coover is constantly defying expectations. His fiction could be defined as magical realism, often stemming from fairy tales, that experiments with structure, order, and perspective to allow the reader to create meaning, or several possible meanings. Many of Coover’s works utilize this structural materiality and segmented text to provide meaning and metaphor, but I chose Heart Suit because it is, physically, a story in a deck of cards, and, therefore, the most materially unconventional of the postmodern texts discussed here.
The deck of cards—from Ace to King—found in the back pocket of Coover’s collection, A Child Again, can be shuffled and read in any order, with the title card first and the joker last, as per the author’s request. They are otherwise interchangeable, and although the characters take on different roles, the plot ends up the same, save for who it is that is caught. The mystery to be solved through the narrative is who, out of eight people in the royal court, stole the King’s tarts. No matter how it is read, the cards flow from one to the other, a challenge even for an author of a linear text. The shuffling of the cards and control the reader has emphasizes the metaphor of life’s chaos. Heart Suit is a game of chance, like love and human relationships. Read in any order, the outcome is always different but it’s still the luck of the draw, so to speak.
Additionally, the metaphor speaks to the unpredictability of readership, and in the end the King, unsure of who has committed the crime because of all the confusion, demands that the suspects are rounded up and shuffled through again. Illustrating the agency of the reader, the Queen ends with: “Well, have it your own way,” sighs the Queen. “But when you are done you will see that I am right.”
