Overview
In a land of sand, dry rocks, and dead things rides the timeless American hero: a forlorn horseman, "leathery and sunburnt and old as the hills. Yet just a kid. Won't ever be anything else." He drifts into a desert ghost town (or, in a sense, it drifts up to him), where, under an obscure obligation, he must serve as both lawman and outlaw, a performance both outrageously comic and profoundly disturbing, reminiscent of Samuel Beckett's clowns and of Miguel de Cervantes's Don Quixote. All the elements of the Western epic are present--heroes and villains, whores and virgins, gunfights, saloon brawls, high-stakes gambling, bank and train robberies, runaway stage coaches, white stallions and black mares, cattle stampedes, prospectors and bounty hunters, jailbreaks, duels, scalp-hunts and hangings--but all radically transformed by Robert Coover's comic energy. Much as Cervantes's spellbound knight brought an end to the era of the medieval European romance, so does Robert Coover's Ghost Town hero bring down the curtain on this century of the American cowboy.Editorials
Allen Barra
"Go back and fill in the genres." That was Mary McCarthy's advice, a few decades ago, for young writers. What she meant was that the rich but crude veins of American genre fiction -- detective stories, westerns, horror stories -- had been around long enough to be refined for a generation of readers now familiar with their conventions. Robert Coover might have heard McCarthy: For nearly a quarter of a century he's been "filling in" all kinds of genres, from the murder mystery (Gerald's Party) to the baseball novel (The Universal Baseball Association, Inc.: J. Henry Waugh, Prop.) to fairy tales (Briar Rose, Pinoccchio In Venice). With Ghost Town, Coover has now metafictionized the western -- or, if you like, created the first phantasmagorical western.
Actually, Ghost Town isn't so much a western as a novel about westerns. A "forlorn horseman on the desert plain" approaches a small town that, no matter how hard he rides, keeps receding into the horizon. Finally he approaches the town from behind -- not only does he reach it, the town rolls in under his horse, as if in greeting. Like a town in a sci-fi movie (in fact, like the city in this year's cult film Dark City), the town is constantly changing -- after a gunfight or bank robbery the buildings shift, rearrange, metamorphose. So does our hero, constantly changing from outlaw to sheriff and back again. The violence in Ghost Town is as horrifically real as in Cormac McCarthy's novels, and the flat, natural descriptions leave nothing to the imagination: "The one-eared man's head splits with a pop as a clay bowl might and his brains ooze out like spilled oatmeal." But no one is killed in Ghost Town, or rather no one stays dead. (They don't even stay jailed for long. Our hero finds that the bars in a jail where he is held prisoner are made of a wood he could have easily punched out.) Like familiar actors who die in one western film only to pop up in another, the characters in Coover's novel get shot, stabbed and hanged, only to reappear in different guises.
Coover's concern is with the mythology of the western, but your reaction to Ghost Town is less likely to hinge on your feelings about westerns than about metafiction in general. There are those who find the works of William Gaddis, William Gass, John Barth, Thomas Pynchon, John Hawkes and others of this group of middle-aged Northern and Midwestern WASPs to be more fun to discuss as theory than to read, and there's no denying that Coover shares their bias for self-conscious technique over content and narrative. Coover, though, possesses gifts associated with traditional fiction. For one thing, he's got an ear for American idiom utterly lacking in the writers he's often grouped with. "Shet yer lip," says a character in Ghost Town to another, "fore I dissect yer innards and make sausages outa em for my dawg's breakfast." And "You pestiferous jugheaded scrag." And "The scrofulous varmint is broke the laws and he's gotta pay fer it." This, as someone in Mel Brooks' Blazing Saddles says, is authentic frontier gibberish. It's also funny, which is another significant way Coover's work differs from that of his contemporaries.
You can't read Ghost Town without conjuring up the ghosts of a thousand old westerns, and you may not be able to see westerns in the future without thinking of this novel. Robert Coover has filled up the genre very well. -- Salon
Richard Bernstein
An exuberant, word-rich parody of an American western. . . .a funny, ribald, and . . .'malancholical' story. . .— The New York Times
From The Critics
Ghost TownRobert Coover
Henry Holt
A lone cowboy rides slowly across the desert, his neckerchief faded, his horse somewhat lame. A town shimmers and moves on the horizonsometimes closer, sometimes farther. The cowboy finds the townor is it the other way around? Who is he? Where is he? Who are they? Everyman. Everywhere. Everyone or no man, no one, nowhere. Either way, it is difficult to care and despite the slimness of the volume, difficult to finish. Robert Coover has been widely praised as a post-modern and hypertext visionary and there is a certain captivating existential playfulness to his work, but to this reader, the novel registers largely as a mechanical, sometimes admirably athletic bore. One slogs through a rogue's gallery of cornball western characters communicating in hackneyed Wild-West speak. The atmospheric babble ("It's got no more meanin' than writin' in the sand with yer dick when the wind's up.") is only occasionally amusing. Our hero interacts with "injuns" (a particularly offensive cartoon portrayal), is beaten up a lot and beats some people up. There is mindless violence and unconvincing, brutal sex, all of which comes off as foreign to the writer and consequently to the reader, amounting to a decent conventional short story that's about 125 pages too long.
Bradley Langer
Library Journal
Coover, one of the pioneer American postmodernist writers, specializes in elaborate parodies of worn-out fictional genres, such as the fairy tale (Briar Rose) and the bedtime story (Pinocchio in Venice, 1991). His latest novel takes on the classic Western. Coover's hero, known as the kid, wanders into a nightmarish frontier town populated by the stock characters of the Old West. The kid alternately plays the roles of outlaw and sheriff as he engages in brawls, poker games, gunfights, and hangings. Coover finds broad comedy in these situations, and he takes particular delight in faithfully transcribing cowboy dialect, as in 'Yu'll never git thar, kid.' But the humor is dark and ugly, and the kid faces each new ordeal with a gloomy, existential hopelessness. Coover's signature fictional style aims at keeping the reader at arm's length, and this distancing, coupled with the Western parody's being an overdone genre itself, makes Ghost Town a book easier to admire than to love. -- Edward B. St. John, Loyola Law School, Los Angeles-- Catherine T. Charvat, John Marshall Library, Alexandria, Virginia