"It isn't that I set out to be a difficult writer, or to exclude my audience," he explains. "It's just that the art form made certain demands on me, and I tried to live up to those demands. And when I did that, it made it hard for many readers, including reviewers, who are not, on the whole, any better prepared than the average reader. Their perspective just isn't large enough to allow them to perceive all that's thrown at them when a form is undergoing transformation."

Coover says he was neither surprised nor concerned when his early work was met with hostility. "Actually, it didn't bother me whatsoever. If anything, it was faintly encouraging. If the work had been accepted, I would have thought: `There's something too easy about this. I must not be pushing hard enough.' "

He was surprised, however, to find himself in something of a literary school -- with John Hawkes, Donald Barthelme, and John Barth, who also started publishing in the late '60s. "I think that we all thought of ourselves as totally original, and we were surprised to find the others," he says. "But, in different but somewhat similar ways, we were all responding to the same things. And, somehow, that made us a gang of writers."

Established ideas about how novels should work were among the things they were responding to. "At that particular moment," Coover recalls, "a lot of people in this country and elsewhere were feeling a kind of postwar malaise. We were looking for new ways of doing things, of seeing things, but the general public was looking for what they were used to. And their impatience with our work . . . was often generated by the sense that we were wasting their time."

The labels attached to Coover and his gang have changed over the years. "For a while," he says, "people called it `metafiction,' or `fabulation,' because we seemed to be thinking through what we were writing while we were writing it, and we tended to have a free-wheeling, imaginative bent to our work," he says. Then, Ray Federman came up with `surfiction,' because of the surrealism. Eventually, the `postmodernist' tag started to stick."

Asked whether his long-standing interest in nonlinear narrative forms was what attracted him to hypertext fiction -- the computer-created, interactive form he teaches and champions -- Coover says literary experimentation has little to do with the direction his academic career has taken. "Actually, hypertext emerged out of technology. It's a product of changes in the way information is being delivered and exchanged," he explains. When, in the spring of 1991, a colleague roped him into teaching a class in hypertext fiction, he recalls, "I hadn't a clue what would happen." But once he started playing around with it, he says, "I realized that it fit a lot of my own tendencies."

Although his latest novel reads a lot like hyperfiction imprisoned in book form, Coover insists that the novel didn't start out as a hypertext, and he won't admit to having any hyperfiction in the works. If he really doesn't, he certainly should. He's been touting it for five years now, and it's high time he showed his hand.

-- Anne Marie Donahue