Just before he died in 1989, Ed Abbey published what he called his "honest novel," one loosely based on his own life. Early in its opening pages, Abbey's alter ego, Lightcap, takes off from his nearly empty home (its contents just removed by a disgruntled spouse) in Tucson, Arizona--but not before shooting his refrigerator, a hated symbol of civilization. Lightcap makes a winding journey by car to his boyhood home in the Appalachian Mountains of Pennsylvania, calling on old friends along the road, visiting Indian reservations and out-of-the-way bars, and reminiscing about the triumphs and follies of his life. Readers would be mistaken to view this as pure autobiography, but The Fool's Progress nonetheless is an illuminating look into Abbey's time and his way of thinking, especially on matters of ecology and other social issues. It's also a picaresque tale humorously and artfully told, a book that Abbey himself rightly regarded as one of his best works of fiction. --Gregory McNamee


From Publishers Weekly
Abbey has won a devoted following with such caustic meditations as Desert Solitaire and anarchistic novels like The Brave Cowboy and The Monkey Wrench Gang. None of them, however, could adequately have prepared one for The Fool's Progress , an epic exploration of Abbey's passionate loves and hatreds, set forth in a wild, picaresque novel that reads at times like a combination of Thomas Wolfe and Jack Kerouac. Henry Lightcap is a woodsman's son from a remote corner of West Virginia who has dedicated his life to nature, music, literature and the pursuit of booze and lovely women. He works only as he has to, to afford the things he craveswhich do not include any of the material products of our culture except for the necessary vehicles for his constant wanderings. Like Abbey himself, Lightcap has spent much of his 53 years in the wilderness of the American West, as park ranger or fire watcher, and is at once passionately devoted to the land and full of rage at what late 20th century America has done to it. At the beginning of the book one of his several wives has walked out on him. Typically, Henry shoots the refrigerator, then gathers up his dying dog and begins a despairing odyssey across a lovely but ruined land from Tucson to the Appalachian family farm still run by his brother; penniless, he has nowhere else to go. Along the way we learn of his childhood, his father, his women, his Army experiencesand receive two huge narrative surprises, of a kind not easy to bring off in a book that is essentially a road novel with flashbacks. One involves the only real love of Henry's life, a tale told with aching tenderness and anguish; the other embraces his very existence. At his best Abbey writes with fierce eloquence of landscape and city, of stunted souls and drunken despair; he can be funny and poignant at once, and describes violent action with horrid vividness. At his worst he gets hyperbolic and full of bile, and a savage streak of male chauvinism surfaces. But Henry, and what he represents, seizes hold of the imagination, so that the reader is carried along as irrevocably as Henry's battered truck, lurching along interstates and fading country roads to a windup as absurdly moving as anything you have read in years. 50,000 first printing; author tour. Copyright 1988 Reed Business Information, Inc.


From Library Journal
Long a rabid defender of the wilderness, a man who has taken an almost anarchic view of the concept of individual freedom, Abbey offers his first fiction in 12 years. The story of a man's journey home (both literally and figuratively), this work is a bitterly humorous commentary on the foibles of modern society and its impact on nature. Government officials, tourists, developers, hippies, Mexicans, Indiansall feel his wrath. For all its surface crudity and earthiness, this novel is full of passion and pathos; Henry Lightcap's lifelong struggle to maintain his individuality and more immediate struggle to complete his journey from Tucson to Stump Creek, West Virginia, assume almost heroic proportions. A powerful, often hauntingly beautiful novel recommended for most libraries.David W. Henderson, Eckerd Coll. Lib., St. Petersburg, Fla.Copyright 1988 Reed Business Information, Inc.


The New York Times Book Review
Abbey can attain a kind of glory in his writing. He takes scenes that have been well-traveled by other writers and recreates them as traditional American myth.


Los Angeles Times Book Review
Praise the earth for Edward Abbey.


Alice Hoffman
He is the voice of all that is ornery and honorable.


Wendell Berry
We are living...among punishments and ruins. For those who know this, Edward Abbey's books remain an indispensable solace.


Review
"Praise the earth for Edward Abbey."--Los Angeles Times Book Review

"Abbey can attain a kind of glory in his writing. He takes scenes that have been well-traveled by other writers and recreates them as traditional American myth."--The New York Times Book Review

"We are living...among punishments and ruins. For those who know this, Edward Abbey's books remain an indispensable solace."--Wendell Berry

"He is the voice of all that is ornery and honorable."--Alice Hoffman



Book Description
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."



About the Author
The author of Desert Solitaire and The Monkey Wrench Gang is unchallenged among radicals of all ages. Edward Abbey, an American icon, called "the original fly in the ointment" by Tom McGuane, today has roads and a town named after him.

FROM THE PUBLISHER

Long after his Desert Solitaire won him a national readership, Edward Abbey provides the fat masterpiece and operatic plainsong that writers and critics have been waiting for. The Fool's Progress is a foil for our culture's cliches and good intentions, and it manages to give meaning to the tumultuous post-World War II years.

FROM THE CRITICS

Publishers Weekly

In a wild, picaresque novel, nature-loving Henry Lightcap makes a despairing odyssey across a lovely but ruined land from Tucson, Ariz., to the Appalachian family farm run by his brother; penniless, Henry has nowhere else to go.

Library Journal

Long a rabid defender of the wilderness, a man who has taken an almost anarchic view of the concept of individual freedom, Abbey offers his first fiction in 12 years. The story of a man's journey home (both literally and figuratively), this work is a bitterly humorous commentary on the foibles of modern society and its impact on nature. Government officials, tourists, developers, hippies, Mexicans, Indians -- all feel his wrath. For all its surface crudity and earthiness, this novel is full of passion and pathos; Henry Lightcap's lifelong struggle to maintain his individuality and more immediate struggle to complete his journey from Tucson to Stump Creek, West Virginia, assume almost heroic proportions. A powerful, often hauntingly beautiful novel. -- .David W. Henderson, Eckerd Coll. Lib., St. Petersburg, Fla.

Library Journal