Coover, you have annoyed me.

I just finished Ghost Town by Robert Coover last night for my class at 9 AM this morning. This is because I hated it. I started reading it on Monday, and every two pages, I'd make a grumpy face and put it down again.

It jumps all over the place, trying to parody every single wild west stereotype. It does a pretty good job of addressing them at least: prostitute & schoolmarm (whore & virgin), sheriffs & interchangeable deputies, train robberies, cattle and accompanying rustlers, a rattlesnake in an empty skull, saloons, bar fights, tumbleweeds, good guys in white and bad guys in black, a jailbreak. I'm leaving quite a few things out, but trust me, it's all in there. All in 147 spastic, disconnected pages. It was episodic, much like the spaghetti westerns it's meant to parody, and it did have its high points.

It's one of those books where I get what he was trying to do, but ultimately I just didn't care. One of the other students in my class pointed out that Coover uses the graphic violence and sex in the novel, along with some really annoying dialect, to keep you interested. To me, all of that just came across as cheap. There was no plot to keep the novel together, so it felt like he used devices or tricks instead. The use of dialect was especially annoying. It was, in fact, mizzerbul. Imagine reading an entire novel like that. Much of it I didn't even think added all that much. He spelled you "yu". It sounds the same and takes twice as long to read. Thank you Coover.

Rob has suggested that I read the The Universal Baseball Association, and I got it from the library, but I won't lie, it's going to take some time for me to forgive Coover for Ghost Town.

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