Rating: 
Summary: Incredible
Review: 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.
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