The idea that absent indigenous peoples haunt the spaces now occupied by the descendants of their conquerors, that their absence therefore constitutes a paradoxical presence, is not new. In 1854, Chief Sealth of the Dwamish, or perhaps his translator, declared that “when your children's children think themselves alone in the field, the store … upon the highway, or in the silence of the pathless woods, they will not be alone … The white man will never be alone.” D. H. Lawrence, in Studies in Classic American Literature (1923), applied this notion, among others, to map the American “spirit of place” as represented in major “white” texts produced in the preceding century or so. In the American Grain (1925) by William Carlos Williams, an important US study that paralleled Lawrence's work, although ostensibly oblivious to the spectral indigenous presence, is itself, as Adam Lifshey shows, also haunted. And, more recently, in Fugitive Poses (1998), Gerald Vizenor cast a searching indigenous eye over “Native American scenes of absence and presence” as represented in a range of North American texts.

But there is much that is new in Lifshey's book. First, in responding to “the transatlantic turn” in American studies, especially the hemispheric reach of such works as Diana Taylor's The Archive and the Repertoire (2003), Lifshey conceptualizes his subject very broadly and, if we accept his premises, coherently. His book “posits ‘America’ as not a particular country or continent or hemisphere but as a reiterating foundational narrative in which a conqueror arrives at a shore determined to overwrite local versions of humanity, culture, ecology and landscape with inscriptions of his own design” (1). The outcome of “the Conquests” is that we are all, worldwide, Americans now. He thus reads Defoe's Robinson Crusoe (1719), written in London on the back of a Pacific shipwreck, and Leoncio Evita's When the Combes Fought (1954), the first African novel in Spanish, as “American” texts. And in an epilogue he claims that Mary Shelley's Frankenstein (1818), set in Switzerland and the Arctic, is, despite its English author, “the great American novel.” Second, several of Lifshey's readings are based on impressive textual or archival scholarship – his accounts of the literature surrounding the explorer Álvar Núñez Cabeza de Vaca, for example – and offer fresh insights, some of them profound. I learnt much from his knowledgeable and sensitive handling of the great Mayan “bible” the Popul Vuh. Third, Specters of Conquest is thematically organized to strike sparks by linking texts from very disparate historical periods and geographical contexts. Thus Columbus's logbooks are seen alongside In the American Grain; the ancient Popol Vuh is paired with a twentieth-century text, the autobiographical I, Rigoberta Menchú: An Indian Woman in Guatemala; and Thomas Pynchon's historical novel Mason & Dixon, about the two eighteenth-century British surveyors who mapped what was to become the North–South divide in the US, is juxtaposed with Gabriel García Márquez's Love in a Time of Cholera (1985), set in Colombia in the fifty years from 1880 onwards.

These disjunctions are, of course, deliberate, and constitute part of Lifshey's claim that all of his texts participate in a continuous process – the making of “America” – that arises from specific historical acts but subsumes and, ultimately, transcends them. He is not cavalier. For example, in discussing Frankenstein he is at pains to acknowledge the book's Europeanness, its ideological point of origin in Romanticism, and as he alerts his readers to contemporary New World sources he also admits their peripheral status. But, at bottom, he is not really interested in the specificities of tracing a genealogy; he is ahistorical and his “America” is a myth or archetype.

This stance provides an explanation for some of the idiosyncrasies of his close readings. I accept that it is not possible, or even desirable, to read any text in its entirety, and on occasion it may be enriching to restrict discussion to choice extracts, but Lifshey sometimes chooses so selectively as to strain credibility. The discussion of the longish García Márquez novel, for instance, concentrates almost exclusively on just two short river journeys, and that of Frankenstein hangs on the novel's couple of very brief references to “the New World.” True, there are latent riches in such selections, and Lifshey exploits them with a grace and erudition that almost makes us miss the sleight of hand involved. But his powerful and provocative thesis would have been all the stronger if he had granted more attention to the problematics of his chronology, disciplined his explications, and exercised more restraint in his claims.