One Man's Life: A Journey Out; A Journey Back

books:

	• The Fool's Progress: An Honest Novel Edward Abbey Holt Paperbacks, 1998 - 528 pages average customer review:based on 89 reviews view larger image
	for more information click here

highly recommended

One of my favorite novels ...

After "The Monkeywrench Gang", this is my favorite book by Abbey -- full of action, humor, and hatred for the death machine ... good read.

Letting it all Hang Out

If you're even the least bit prudish or squeamish about startling sex scenes leaping off the page and coming right at you, forget Ed's book. If you're not, dig in - it's a hoot - tempered throughout by sorrow, regret over fancied failure, soft heart pretending to be tough, a personality so complex as to never be destined to be happy with a woman. The reader senses that he wishes it were otherwise but really doesn't know what to do about it without becoming someone he himself can't live with. Ed Abbey represents the true essence of the person known as a "Free Spirit." It was written as he himself was failing in health as I understand it from those who have gotten into his biography - and as a result of this, he probably thought "let it rip - it's my finale - let them think what they will".

It's a vast departure from another well-written book of his, "Desert Solitaire," which I thoroughly enjoyed in an entirely different way. It starts out with our hero whipping up a batch of bread - something he obviously has done many times before during a crisis, kneading, kneading, working out on the counter a recurring upheaval: yet another wife left him. In fact, in one of the funniest lines, he receives a phone call from a male friend during the bread baking, who asked him how he was. Answering "I'm baking bread", the friend responds "she left you again, didn't she?"

He sets out on his journey across country to forget and possibly to get another grip against his latest personal failure; tries valiantly to leave an old, ill dog behind because he knows he shouldn't take it along, and fails at that too, slamming on his brakes in a cloud of dust, opening the door in resignation and the mental scene of the old dog struggling to get into the front seat is heart rendering. It goes from one outrageous adventure to another, rendering you helpless in laughter or astonished and breathless at some hidden aspect of human nature he doesn't bother to conceal through discreet wording; sometimes you can't believe he can keep up the pace of the idea stream, yet he does throughout.

I enjoyed it and found it one of the most unusual books I ever read but in recommending it to others, refer to "sentence # 1" of my review.

for more information click here

One Man's Life: A Journey Out; A Journey Back

Henry Lightcap migrates westward on the cusp of maturity but heads back east near the end of his life. This novel describes both journeys at once in a series of interleaved chapters. Each journey has its own logic, but we don't fully understand Lightcap or the relationship between his journeys until the end of the book, when both journeys have been completed.

Lightcap is Abbey's alter ego, much as the fictional narrator of "A Fan's Notes" is Frederick Exley's. Abbey and Exley have plenty in common, and so do their alter egos. Neither author was easy to live with, and neither tried to make his alter ego more congenial than himself. Indeed, an accurate portrayal of his own worst traits is a grim goal toward which Abbey and Exley both strived.

Lightcap's intellectual energy holds the reader's attention from beginning to end. This is completely appropriate, considering that Abbey says of Lightcap's own reading that, "He remembered best not the development of character or the unraveling of plot or the structure of an argument but simply the quality of the author's mind. That part remained, and by that standard alone he finally judged the author and either threw the book aside or read it through and searched out more by the same writer."

Edward Abbey, I perfectly understand this approach to literature. It perfectly explains how reading Desert Solitaire brought me to The Fool's Progress and is about to bring me to all of your other books.

for more information click here

not his best

I honestly preferred Monkey Wrench and Desert Solitaire but this is worth a read. It's a thinkpiece and gives you a little insight into the author. Wonderful imagery with honest to goodness hills and valleys.The Monkey Wrench Gang (P.S.)Desert SolitaireConfessions of a Barbarian: Selections from the Journals of Edward Abbey

Pilgrim in progress, sometimes fooled

Vulgar but funny and philosophically dense life story of Henry Holyoak Lightcap, a West Virginia hillbilly removed to the great Southwest. His misadventures in life and love provide a funny and ribald background to serious matters as well as silly ones.

His vocabulary and cadence remind me so much of a dear friend of mine that I wondered if he had not written this book psuedonymically.

for more information click here

reviews: page 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, 7, 8, 9, 10

When his third wife abandons him in Tucson, boozing, misanthropic anarchist Henry Holyoak Lightcap shoots his refrigerator and sets off in a battered pick-up truck for his ancestral home in West Virginia. Accompanied only by his dying dog and his memories, the irascible warhorse (a stand-in for the "real" Abbey) begins a bizarre cross-country odyssey--determined to make peace with his past--and to wage one last war against the ravages of "progress."

hot