Ghost Town: A Novel [Hardcover]

Robert Coover (Author)

Book Description

Publication Date: September 1998

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.

Editorial Reviews

Amazon.com Review

Cross Cormac McCarthy with Eugene Ionesco and you might get something like Robert Coover's Ghost Town. The hero of this spaghetti Western is an unnamed cowboy riding along through a "vast empty plain, where nothing seems to have happened yet and yet everything seems already over...." Exhausted and parched, he sets his sights across the distant horizon only to find himself overtaken--literally--by a small, seemingly deserted little town. With the immutable logic of a dream, he becomes caught up in a strange, disjointed chain of events, in which drunken gamblers declare him sheriff and a saloon chanteuse stakes him out for her own. Meanwhile, the cowboy carries a torch for a melancholy, pale-faced woman known as the schoolmarm, who has a disturbing propensity for correcting his grammar while slapping his face. If, after wandering through Ghost Town's bloody streets for a while, readers find themselves suspecting that this is one of them newfangled metafictions, Coover will not disappoint. He plants the requisite empty plain-empty page analogies, and the book's denouement is nothing less than sexuality and textuality in a showdown at high noon. But there is more here than mere postmodern pastiche. Coover writes with prodigious intellectual energy and quicksilver wit; his sentences are never less than surprising, and often possess a sublime beauty all their own. As for his take on the genre's conventions, Coover may have struck closer to home than we think. Long stretches of tedium interrupted by flashes of hallucinatory violence: in its own bizarre way, Ghost Town might be the most realistic depiction of the Old West in a very long time. --Mary Park

From Publishers Weekly

A nameless drifter rides into a ghost town from a desolate wilderness. His horse wanders off. Hearing noises in the saloon, he enters to find a crew playing poker, a humpback at the piano and a red-haired chanteuse pitching a doleful melody. These pop tropes, culled from westerns and dirty jokes, are trademark Coover material. As you'd expect, things rapidly shift?the humpback becomes a deputy, the drifter a sheriff, the poker-playing crew now a posse, now a lynch mob. As in A Night at the Movies, persons and places are variables in an equation and have a tendency to rapidly shuck identities, while their relationships, ossified in the cliches where Coover found them, remain constant. The chanteuse and the schoolmarm seem to be the only characters who are anchored in the real world, but don't bet on it. This novel is written in the Davy Crockett English Coover employed with devastating wit in The Public Burning ("Us proper ladies jest ain't habituated t'sechlike incivil misabuse," "I tole him he wuz a rat for stealin thet hoss," etc.), but here the jokiness is forced, and the language never takes off. Coover's career is divided between the genius who wrote The Public Burning and most of Gerald's Party and the smarty-pants who wrote Spanking the Maid and parts of Pinocchio in Venice. The smarty-pants knows all too much about literary theory but can't distinguish between a sneer and a laugh. The genius, on the other hand, like a lyrical W.C. Fields, taps into the rudiments of liberation submerged in the lamest practical joke. Sad to say, the smarty-pants runs this town.
Copyright 1998 Reed Business Information, Inc.

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Product Details

• Hardcover: 147 pages
• Publisher: Henry Holt & Co; 1st edition (September 1998)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0805058842
• ISBN-13: 978-0805058840
• Product Dimensions: 8.3 x 5.8 x 0.8 inches
• Shipping Weight: 8 ounces
• Average Customer Review: 4.0 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (10 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #1,626,160 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

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Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

11 of 14 people found the following review helpful:

2.0 out of 5 stars Okay, I must have read the wrong book, January 17, 1999

By 

Josh Cartin ([e-mail]) (Hong Kong) - See all my reviews

This review is from: Ghost Town: A Novel (Hardcover)

Well, this one I can fully blame on The New York Times Book Review:

My first contact with Coover's work came when a college girlfriend (an English major) gave me a few stories from "Pricksongs and Descants." I thought his meta-textual writing was interesting, but in the end, more akin to a linguistic experiment than to a work of fine literature: i.e., something that one would expect to be assigned for an English class.

My experience with Coover's "Universal Baseball Association..." was infinitely more satisfying, and that book remains one of the most imaginative and subtle works I have read to date. Coover's writing in that novel is not overtly gimmicky as in "Pricksongs..." and for that matter "Ghost Town." Rather than aim his irony at the text itself, he aims it at the subject matter, and the end result is a "meta-fiction" about baseball that brilliantly meditates upon the nature of loneliness.

Disappointingly, I found no such deeper, "human" message in "Ghost Town." The New York Times whet my appetite when it review of "Ghost Town" was combined with a journalistic narrative about the Southwest by "Balkan Ghosts" writer, Robert Kaplan. Being a southwesterner myself, I was anxious to read Coover's take on the American West. It was painfully obvious after a mere fifty pages that what I was going to end up with was not a commentary on the West, but rather on the Western literary and television genre...

...which is a neat idea, and Coover's deft prose style delivers just that: a neat novel. What is missing from this book, with its moonlit deserts, saloon brawls, bawdy brothels, upended wagons, gunfights and campfire tales, is any attempt at plumbing for the true significance of the American West. Coover is content to take L'Amour's and Grey's interpretation to its carnal extremes, but he does so without once supplying his own theory about that which is being interpreted.

It is not enough for Coover to subvert the Western genre without attempting to grasp its original subject matter. This fatal neglect turns "Ghost Town" into a comic book with big vocabulary, and ensures that its literary longevity is destined to ride off into a rather well-illustrated sunset.

3 of 4 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Amazing genreless genre fiction, September 24, 2001

By 

Jason Edwards (San Jose, CA) - See all my reviews

This review is from: Ghost Town (Paperback)

Those who come to Coover from his earlier works are well-prepared for this remarkable synthesis of excellent language, excellent description, excellent mood. Those new to Coover will delight in their discovery. Ghost Town is somehow less earnest, more effortless, than earlier Coover, and is more mature for it. Here is a novel that makes no apologies, denies an association with the "modern novel," and expertly ignores the western as genre by setting itself right in the middle of it. In Coover's Ghost Town, genre cliches become literary devices, and stereotypes become grammatical foils. Critics (not to mention grad students) will be playing with this one for years; casual readers will carry it around with them and read their favorite bits over and over again for even longer.

3 of 4 people found the following review helpful:

4.0 out of 5 stars ANOTHER GENRE SKEWERED..., August 29, 2001

By 

S. Henderson (Hazlet, New Jersey USA) - See all my reviews
(REAL NAME)   

This review is from: Ghost Town (Paperback)

If you've read BRIAR ROSE (also by Coover) and liked it, you'll drool over this 'un. The western novel as epitomized by Zane Grey is deliciously lampooned in such a nightmarish style that I don't think I'll ever watch another western movie without thinking of this book. Everything's in here including the kitchen sink: campfire shootouts, grisly killings, barroom brawls, the sex-starved saloon chanteuse, endless wandering the plains on an indifferent hoss, the hero (if you can call him that) saving the schoolmarm on a traintrack that seems to move right under his feet. The dialogue is itself a hoot as Coover hits this dead-on. It's fun to recognize a character who's been killed earlier in the story; indeed, no one stays dead so as the book comes to an end you can imagine how it could go on and on and on...In all, a short, strange parody to end the western as we know it.