The Review of Contemporary Fiction

Ghost Town by Robert Coover
Robert L. McLaughlin

Robert Coover. Ghost Town. Henry Holt, 1998. 147 pp. $24.00.

Throughout his career, Robert Coover has examined, parodied, and deconstructed the conventions and discourses of a plethora of literary genres. In Ghost Town he turns his attention to that most American of genres, the Western.

The novel follows a nameless drifter, familiar from any number of stories and movies, yet also vague, more a type than a character. He moves from adventure to adventure, or, more accurately, the adventures—all recognizable from the conventions of the Western—come to him: he makes a name for himself in a barroom brawl; he’s tricked into a wedding ceremony with a brassy chanteuse, while he pines for the prim, unattainable schoolmarm; he’s made the sheriff, then becomes an outlaw, then becomes sheriff again as he tries to save the schoolmarm from hanging. Moreover, we’re told he has vague and contradictory memories of having been initiated into an Indian tribe, of having a wife and family and sheep ranch, of having a near-fatal affair with a prairie nymph. More narratives are concentrated on him than his character can support coherently, and as his sense of self is lost so too are senses of time and space—both operate arbitrarily. The drifter moves through this topsy-turvy frontier world with no sense of motivation beyond a dim awareness of some force (the Western’s narrative conventions) pushing him on.

The master narrative beneath the surface narratives here is Frederick Jackson Turner’s frontier thesis, the argument that encountering the frontier defined fundamental American qualities. Coover seems to agree, but his view of the resulting American character is much darker than Turner’s. The people the drifter meets are all misshapen, violent, racist, misogynist, and androcentric, an anarchic community, whose cruel whims—in a sort of Alice in Wonderland logic—become immediate rules. The drifter too participates in a cultural amnesia (his “history escapes him even as he experiences it”), which allows him to deny responsibility for his acts.

In subverting the narrative conventions of Westerns, Ghost Town reveals a version of the American and a vision of America they usually keep masked. Coover has aimed at the dangerous absurdities of our national myth, as embodied in our stories of the frontier, and has hit his target with brilliant force. [Robert L. McLaughlin]


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The Review of Contemporary Fiction Ghost Town by Robert Coover Robert L. McLaughlin Robert Coover. Ghost Town. Henry Holt, 1998. 147 pp. $24.00. Throughout his career, Robert Coover has examined, parodied, and deconstructed the conventions and discourses of a plethora of literary genres. In Ghost Town he turns his attention to that most American of genres, the Western. The novel follows a nameless drifter, familiar from any number of stories and movies, yet also vague, more a type than a character. He moves from adventure to adventure, or, more accurately, the adventures—all recognizable from the conventions of the Western—come to him: he makes a name for himself in a barroom brawl; he’s tricked into a wedding ceremony with a brassy chanteuse, while he pines for the prim, unattainable schoolmarm; he’s made the sheriff, then becomes an outlaw, then becomes sheriff again as he tries to save the schoolmarm from hanging. Moreover, we’re told he has vague and contradictory memories of having been initiated into an Indian tribe, of having a wife and family and sheep ranch, of having a near-fatal affair with a prairie nymph. More narratives are concentrated on him than his character can support coherently, and as his sense of self is lost so too are senses of time and space—both operate arbitrarily. The drifter moves through this topsy-turvy frontier world with no sense of motivation beyond a dim awareness of some force (the Western’s narrative conventions) pushing him on. The master narrative beneath the surface narratives here is Frederick Jackson Turner’s frontier thesis, the argument that encountering the frontier defined fundamental American qualities. Coover seems to agree, but his view of the resulting American character is much darker than Turner’s. The people the drifter meets are all misshapen, violent, racist, misogynist, and androcentric, an anarchic community, whose cruel whims—in a sort of Alice in Wonderland logic—become immediate rules. The drifter too participates in a cultural amnesia (his “history escapes him even as he experiences it”), which allows him to deny responsibility for his acts. In subverting the narrative conventions of Westerns, Ghost Town reveals a version of the American and a vision of America they usually keep masked. Coover has aimed at the dangerous absurdities of our national myth, as embodied in our stories of the frontier, and has hit his target with brilliant force. [Robert L. McLaughlin]

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