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On
the Shelf
Ghost
Town
Reinvigorating
the exhausted western, Robert Coover's Ghost Town
(Henry Holt and Company) is at once a novel about the American cowboy
and a postmodern parody of its genre. Coover, AM'65, concocts a
crew of ghostly townspeople with a penchant for the bizarre, engaging
them in morbid, innuendo-laden versions of the usual gunfights,
bank heists, and barroom brawls. His nameless protagonist, "the
stranger," stumbles through this phantasmagoric cascade of events,
narrowly avoiding his demise.
Thrust into
the position of sheriff soon after arriving in town, the stranger
is thrown headlong into the town's warped reality. His futile attempts
at justice are complicated by a supporting cast who-much like extras
in a low-budget spaghetti western-often rise from the dead to reappear
later in different disguises and roles. The stranger's requisite
love interest, the town's schoolmarm, is too engaged in correcting
the townspeople's fractured grammar to receive him. But when she
is sentenced to the gallows, the stranger fights to save her-and
himself-from the town that haunts his every move.-M.D.B.
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