SOURCE: Quinn, Paul. “The Lone Cowboy.” Times Literary Supplement, no. 5002 (12 February 1999): 21.

In the following review, Quinn praises the reissued edition of The Public Burning and offers a positive assessment of Ghost Town.

Imagine a re-worked Mount Rushmore, sculpted in dynamite. Looming large in the Dakota sunlight are the conjoined forms of monumentalized media-age presidents: JFK, Ronald Reagan and Bill Clinton flank a frowning Richard Nixon, the shadow at five o'clock spilling off his granite chin into the valley below through which a lone cowboy rides. Such a landscape, of history and mediated myth—and the increasingly uncertain territory between—is conjured up when one moves from Robert Coover's reissued magnum opus, The Public Burning, through his subsequent work, arriving finally at the bleached Old West of his latest novel, Ghost Town.

As the century itself rides into the sunset, a great deal of critical received wisdom is due...