Ghost Town.

Davis, Robert Murray

Robert Coover. Ghost Town. New York. Henry Holt. 1998. 147 pages. $24. ISBN 0-8050-5884-2.

Like Mel Brooks, Robert Coover relies heavily upon pastiche and parody, but his attempt at a western is in quality more like Robin Hood: Men in Tights than Blazing Saddles. Coover's central character in Ghost Town is a man with no name; in fact, none of the characters or settings has a name. The anonymity probably results in part from Coover's desire to write as generically as possible-this is observable in the language, which is part Louis L'Amour, part Cormac McCarthy-in part from the shape- and role-shifting of people and places. For example, the saloon girl metamorphoses into the schoolmarm and back again, though this is not clear until well into the novel.

The central character is moving from where and what he can't clearly remember to an unknown destination on a horse, or sequence of horses, that die and revive. He comes to a nameless town filled with maimed and homicidal Republic Pictures rejects who can't hit spittoons, discovers that he has been made sheriff, and stumbles through a series of misadventures ranging from killings to a near-wedding (dressed in the bride's bloomers), a near-hanging, and other near misses. At the end, the people and town have rushed into the sunset, leaving him lying on the darkened street with "nothing to be seen except the black sky riddled with star holes overhead."

A reviewer could, like Sven Birkerts in the New York Times Book Review, find refuge in talk about postmodernity. But even Birkerts admits that much of the book is dull and confusing. Prospective readers who are less trendy should pass by this horseman and read Alvin Greenberg's masterful and neglected work The Invention of the West (1976) to see a really witty and inventive take on the West of pulp fiction and "B" movies.

Robert Murray Davis

University of Oklahoma