From The Writer’s Alamanac with Garrison Keillor:

It’s the birthday of novelist and short-story writer Robert Coover, (books by this author) born in Charles City, Iowa (1932). As a boy, he moved with his family to a mining town in rural Illinois, where his father ran the local newspaper. His first novel, The Origin of the Brunists (1966), is about the lone survivor of a mining accident who goes on to start a religious cult. In response to the question “Why do you write?” he once said, “Because art blows life into the lifeless, death into the deathless.” And, “Because art’s lie is preferable, in truth, to life’s beautiful terror.”   He has gone on to write many experimental novels, including The Universal Baseball Association, Inc. (1968), The Public Burning (1977), and A Child Again (2005).

My companion at the end of the movie There Will be Blood remarked “Now what do you make of that?”  I too was a trifle baffled at the story and the message.  A rather contradictory character starts out in New Mexico mining silver or is it gold, but finds oil.  Great shots of hard-core mining practices by the small-time 18th century miners.  Enough to make your heart beat with pride. Until they blow things up and workers die.  But the technical incompetence and death is all rather neutral and low key.

The story could be that of a modern Vancouver mining junior: find an ore body, struggle to get it started, get interrupted by accidents and local politics, have the majors go after you and your find, and ultimately sell for a fortune to retire to a mansion in British Properties. 

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