Ghost Town: A Novel - Hardcover

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

Robert Coover lives in London and in Providence, Rhode Island, where he teaches at Brown University. He is the author of many novels (including Gerald's Party and The Public Burning), short-story collections, and plays.