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Ghost Town
by: Robert Coover

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Binding: Paperback
Dewey Decimal Number: 813.54
EAN: 9780802136664
ISBN: 0802136664
Label: Grove Press
Manufacturer: Grove Press
Number Of Items: 1
Number Of Pages: 160
Publication Date: 2000-03
Publisher: Grove Press
Sales Rank: 569830
Studio: Grove Press

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Editorial Review:

Product Description:
A nameless rider plods through the desert toward a dusty Western town shimmering on the horizon. In his latest novel, Robert Coover has taken the familiar form of the Western and turned it inside out. The lonesome stranger reaches the town - or rather, it reaches him - and he becomes part of its gunfights, saloon brawls, bawdy houses, train robberies, and, of course, the choice between the saloon chanteuse or the sweet-faced schoolmistress whom he loves. Throughout, Robert Coover reanimates the Western epics of Zane Grey and Louis L'Amour, infusing them with the Beckettian echoes, unique comic energy, and exuberant prose that have made him one of the most influential figures in contemporary American literature. It is, as The Washington Post Book World put it, 'a fast-forward, ribald vision of the American West, a free-for-all that slides from surreal to ridiculous like a circus-goer's grin through a funhouse mirror . . . a heady frisson, a salon entertainment, one helluva ride.'

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

Customer Reviews

Average Rating: out of 5 stars

Rating:

- A definitively postmodern western.
I enjoyed this book immensely. Fans of metafiction--that is, fiction about the way fiction works--will find much to enjoy here. Readers looking for a linear storyline and 'realistic' plot should probably stay away. As mentioned before, 'GHOST TOWN' is perhaps best described as a send-up of the Cormac McCarthry western in the style, perhaps, of Thomas Pynchon, Donald Barthemle or Italo Calvino. It is rather imperative that one understands and appreciates the metafiction aesthetic, at least in general, if s/he plans to get anything approaching enjoyment out of this novel. Otherwise, there is a significant chance that you will come away rather frustrated. If this sounds like something you think you might enjoy then I'd be willing to bet that you will.

Rating:

- A Delight From Beginning To End
This is the first Robert Coover book I have read, and I must say, I thoroughly enjoyed it! Some of the dialog was so funny, I had to laugh out loud. The style in which this was written is so refreshing; unlike anything I have read. It's like 'The Twilight Zone' meets 'Gunsmoke' or something. This book may not appeal to all readers, but for me, it was perfectly entertaining. I look forward to reading more of Robert Coover's books.

Rating:

- More Over praised Fiction
Ghost Town, Robert Coover (7/02): This is an amazing novel in that it is simultaneously juvenile and pretentious. This attempt at a Beckian version of Cormak McCarthy succeeds on no level. The long drawn out prose are neither poetic nor sparse. The re-visioning of the cowboy myth, by portraying a violent grotesque environment, only come off as silly and has been done before. I could not tell whether the frequent, homey existential quips by the cowboys were supposed to make fun the of the genre or were meant to be profound. Yet, they succeeded at neither. In short, this is another over-praised novel by an author of noteworthy intentions but little original skill needed to pull it off.

Rating:

- The bloodiest knife fight in fiction history
Less disconnected than some Coover books I've read, Ghost Town borrows elements from literary and hollywood westerns and gives them a subversive and often graphic edge. At times a wonderful read with passages that flow beautifully and at other times harsh and violent. It contains the single bloodiest knife fight in fiction history. All in all a risky venture but Coover blends these two opposites and keeps it together through the end.

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