Book review of “Good News,” a novel by Edward Abbey

Good News, a novel by Edward Abbey

This book was painful to read, and this book review even more painful to write. Spare yourself the agony of reading this post-apocalyptic fantasy with pointless dialog within a meandering and lackadaisical plot that goes nowhere. Most books have meaningful conclusions, but this book just ends. And hardly soon enough. The bad news about “Good News” is that you’ll find Abbey’s classic polemics on only 16 pages of this 242-page novel. The rest is mindless fluff.

This print-on-demand Plume paperback is a verbatim reprint that reproduces the identical layout and pagination of the 242-page Dutton hardcover1st edition. Having compared the two editions side-by-side, I can attest that they match exactly. Curiously, the chapters are not numbered, so your only navigation guide is the pagination. The golden 13 pages are the diatribes against industrialism and totalitarianism on pages 1–4, 104, 120–124, 183, and 186–187. That’s it. Three more pages, pages 164–166, provide a riveting depiction of gallows hangings. That’s totals of only 1/15th of the book.

Fortunately, the four-page prologue, pages 1–4, is reproduced in its entirety among the first 25 pages generously offered in Amazon’s “Read Sample.” After that prologue, it’s all downhill. Buy this book only if you a library-card-carrying zealous fan of Abbey intent on reading all his novels. That would be me. Edward Abbey is my favorite contemporary American author, but this is my least favorite of all of Abbey’s books, as bad even as the embarrassingly abysmal Hayduke Lives, his posthumously published final novel that should have been buried with him.

I have read all of Abbey’s both fiction and nonfiction books except for his first novel, “Jonathan Troy.” I am saving that one for reading on my deathbed because, like most first novels, it is so lowly regarded that even Abbey had disavowed it. Far from his first, “Good News” is the 6th of Abbey’s eight novels, sandwiched between “The Monkey Wrench Gang” and his masterpiece Great American Novel, The Fool’s Progress (see my own loooong review).

All the adulatory blurbs on the book covers and all but one of the blurbs on the Amazon webpage refer to Abbey’s oeuvre generally, not to this book specifically. What could explain the decline of Abbey’s literary powers? What provoked the otherwise masterful Abbey to write such fluff? After the critical praise and enthusiastic readership of its predecessor novel, Abbey surely did not write out of a need for its royalty payments. Some people guess that he wrote “Good News” while enduring a depressive state after his recent diagnosis of a fatal disease, yet such speculation is not congruous with the persona that Abbey projected both in his life and his literature. Regardless its reason or origin, “Good News” is mostly bad news.

Reviewed by Mark Mathew Braunstein www.MarkBraunstein.Org