SOURCE: Davis, Robert Murray. Review of Ghost Town, by Robert Coover. World Literature Today 73, no. 2 (spring 1999): 344.

In the following negative review, Davis criticizes Coover's prose in Ghost Town.

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...