Lennon, Brian. "Postmodern Heroes." Review of Ghost Town by Robert Coover. The Boston Book Review 5.7 (September 1998): 42.

Reproduced here in edited form, for personal or classroom use but not for republication. Citations should follow the original printed version.

The Western enjoys a special place among the borrowings of U.S. literary postmodernism. As the cornerstone of that approximation called American myth, the lonesome cowboy stands for just that adventuresome rejection of convention so prized by both aesthetic and social experimentalists. At the same time, he embodies the earnest and un-self-conscious personal heroism that so much of our fiction since the 1960s has worked to overturn. As we move toward what some are terming a "post-postmodern" aesthetic of fiction, the most pressing question might seem to be whether the descendants of the anti-novel have succeeded in undermining the Romantic and vitalist impulses to which the first literary postmodernists declared themselves so vehemently opposed. Whether, that is, we have succeeded in creating a fiction that is fully depersonalized, more open to uncertainty, to difference, and to diversity, and hence (in theory at least) more essentially democratic.

Robert Coover has earned a reputation as one of the bawdiest of these oppositional writers, and if it is tempting to reduce the hypertrophically gendered exuberance of his work to its origin in the relaxation of censorship that began in the late Fifties (and which might be said to have produced a tyranny of genital writing) it is also true that Coover is consummately arch in his portraits of our culture, so that any evaluation of his work must always come to grips with its ephemeral ironies. Whether his subject is baseball, the travails of Richard Nixon, Casablanca, cocktail-party anomie, or Pinocchio (and specifically, Pinocchio's nose), Coover handles his material with a sensibility that comes to seem finally---against all expectation---delicate. What distinguishes Coover within the masculinist-maudlin cohort of the Updikes and Bellows, on the one hand, and that of the icily technocratic Pynchons and DeLillos, on the other, is the finely modulated human warmth that rinses the surface of his depersonalized fables.

An unnamed protagonist wakes up in the middle of a desert, not knowing, really, who he is or what he is doing, just that "it wasn't always like this," that in some time "back then" he had had a purpose, he had been "chasing something," or being chased by it. After thus taking stock of himself, he rides off toward the town on the horizon. On the way there he has a confrontation with "bandits" sitting around a fire, shooting one of them to death. In a saloon in town, he murders a drunk, after which, in more or less rapid succession, he is forced to eat part of his own horse, becomes the sheriff, falls in love with the town "marm," and nearly gets married to the town chanteuse---all while purposelessly tearing back and forth between the desert and the town, knowing, like Beckett's Molloy, only that "he is migrating... it is where he is now, and out here there's nothing to stop for, no turning back either, nothing back there to turn to."

He wipes the blood off on the dead man's flannel shirt, tucks it back in his belt, and turns again to the barkeep, who hands him a shiny brass key strung on a black velvet ribbon. He nods up the stairs. No thanks, he says, and hands the key back. Jest gimme a goddam drink. But the barkeep is gone, the bar as well, and the key he is poking forward is sliding into a door lock.

Characters rear up suddenly out of the landscape, like pop-up figures in an arcade shootout game; they are immediately shot, or otherwise dealt with, and then drop out of sight again---after which the protagonist might black out and wake up in the middle of another, different, but equally menacing situation, and the movement of confrontation/rapid resolve/scene shift resumes. Such surrealistically disjunctive transit will resist no one who knows that Coover prefers to teach "electronic writing" rather than the standard fiction workshops at Brown University; they are the stuff of hypertext, which permits the reader to dive into the work and wade around a bit---choosing, as it were, her own adventure (often for better, one thinks, but certainly sometimes also for worse). What is remarkable about this dynamic within Ghost Town is its essential finesse: each episode of structural violence carries over enough of the present "screen" to avoid presenting a merely theoretical juxtaposition.

This structural contribution to the avant-pop Gestalt of Ghost Town is only the most obvious. Coover is adept at rendering a caricatured cowboy drawl, infused with just enough anachronism and irony to keep one on one's toes, and his verbal cartoonery, in character and set (rather than scene) description is typically keen, if certainly radically politically incorrect. Coover's sense of comedy, too, while bound always to injure someone, is at once acerbic and distantly (but I think clearly) humane, and when it succeeds, it succeeds wildly, like that of Beckett or of Thomas Bernhard:

He soaked himself, filled his canteen, and got ready to move on, but the horse had contrary notions and wouldn't budge from the spot. This was stupid, there was nothing to eat, no protection from the blistering sun, and anyway it made no larger sense, but the cantankerous thing seemed ready just to give it all up and toss in there with all those other anonymous bones. He talked to it, cajoled it, cursed it, kicked it, tried to lead it away on foot, yanked on its ears and bridle, used the horsewhip on it, his rifle stock, but the useless old scrag would not move; it was as still and stubborn as stone. Then, after he'd been whipping it mercilessly until his arms were ready to drop, he saw that what he was beating was stone and the damned horse was over on the other side of the hole, head down, still serenely lapping up water. He was furious. He whistled sharply at the perverse beast and it stepped toward him, into the water, and disappeared.

Like a good postmodernist, Coover is appropriating and redacting a variety of sources, from the "naively" self-celebrating Western to the burlesque of Don Quixote, itself the paradigmatic deflation of horse-mounted pomposity. Risks taken here are familiar ones: that an "untrained" reader will read for identification, rather than thought; that one thereby restricts one's audience to trained readers; that even a trained reader may suspect one's structural irony to be, as it were, structurally insincere. Only a healthy commitment to the insufficiency of one's efforts, their explicit non-universality, perhaps, can work to address this:

He steps back and considers all of this, looks about him. The only sign of life is his own hat out in the middle of the empty street. He has misjudged everything. The town's been abandoned. He's all alone.

One hears echoes here, too, of Molloy extinguishing his lamp---a gesture reminding us that the literary writer of postmodernity is no sage, no visionary, no amanuensis of the Muse, but rather an ordinary person, as fatally stuck with and in a commoditized and watered-down mass culture as anyone, whose only unusual virtue is that she or he can hear (and do) its different voices. What Coover and his literary-historical compatriots have forsaken, in the authority of literary vision, tends to return to them, perhaps, in this listening: in an attunement to the popular media that always strongly influence, if never wholly determine, our social communication. It means, perhaps, in turn, that the reader must do some work to hear "the author's voice" among so many others on offer. It's well worth the effort here.

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