Book review of The Fool’s Progress: An Honest Novel by Edward Abbey, 1988

A master storyteller, eloquent writer, and profound thinker, that’s Abbey all in one Great American Novel.

I love Edward Abbey. The writings, not the man. I think everyone would like a Van Gogh painting hanging in their living room, but few would welcome the paint-spattered Vincent himself sitting in their living room. (Living room? As Abbey observes in “The Fool’s Progress,” Living rooms are cluttered with only Dead objects.) I might feel the same about Abbey because it is hard to separate the man from his writings, and especially difficult in this, his last great book. While fictitious, it is also very demi-hemi-semi-autobiographical.

Honest about the book’s subtitle, “An Honest Novel,” Edward the author has unabashedly created in his main character, Henry, what some readers might interpret as the author’s own alter ego. Whether Edward or not, Henry is a self-absorbed, self-pitying, hot-tempered, gunslinging, cigar-smoking, booze-guzzling, pain-pill-popping, grease-slurping, carnivorous, narcissistic, bigoted, racist, sexist, womanizing macho male obsessed over the prowess of his penis. I leave to the biographers and psychoanalysts to sort out within this Edward/Henry dichotomy which of these aforementioned shortcomings are characteristic only of Henry and which also of Edward. Is Edward, through Henry, merely playacting the role of bad boy? Does it even matter? I forgive both of them for their human foibles because both of them are wise men who practice the fine art of self-awareness with a healthy dose of self-deprecation. After all, who’s the self-titled Fool?

I don’t recall being so mindful of the journey of any fictional character as I was in between my reading stints during which the novel continued to occupy my thoughts throughout the day. I don’t mean its plot, as I did not find myself wondering what happens next, because I already knew that. (No surprise! The antihero dies, and lives happily ever after.) Rather, I found myself pondering the philosophical ideas that permeate its pages. As a philosophical novel, it is thick with thought, and during and in between my readings its wisdom stirred many thoughts of my own, too.

Peppered throughout every page you will find Abbey’s characteristic social criticism, his ridicule of both high and popular culture, his diatribes against industrial pollution and corporate greed, his insightful travelogues exploring American cityscapes and landscapes, his laments for the vanishing wilderness, his elegies about the wonders of the natural world, and his metaphysical musings about the mysteries and the meaning, if any, of life. In short, his wisdom. Much like Melville’s observations about life and death embedded throughout “Moby-Dick,” Abbey’s flashes of insights appear randomly and unexpectedly here, there, and everywhere.

And there’s more. There are literary allusions, for instance, the first page of “Tom Sawyer” that opens with Tom’s “No answer” to his aunt is echoed in the first page of “Fool’s Progress” that includes Henry’s “No response” to his teacher. And there are hidden homages, for instance, Thoreau’s “There are no more philosophers, only professors of philosophy.” And there are just plain outright thefts from iconic lines of literary lions, but with Abbey’s twist of logic. Some twisted homages are throwaways, for instance, Tolstoy’s “Happy divorces are all alike. Every unhappy divorce is unhappy in its own way.” Other twists are giveaways, for instance, T.S. Eliot’s “April is the coolest month.”

All along Henry’s cross-country pilgrimage you’ll pass Edward’s signposts as a profound thinker, a master storyteller, and an eloquent writer. I marvel at how his reporting the daily weather always turn into soulful rhapsodies about nature’s beauty. On this road trip, the landscapes change quickly, yet the descriptions of the passing landscapes here rival those of the haunting deserts and grand canyons in Abbey’s nonfiction magnum opus, “Desert Solitaire.” As more people populate the landscapes here than in “Desert Solitaire,” so do abound the detailed portraits that Abbey paints of the people Henry meets, and not just their faces, bodies, and clothing, but also their mannerisms, demeanors, speech, and thoughts. Especially their thoughts.

Abbey parades his creativity on every page. There’s his compacting together snappy exchanges of dialogs liberated from extraneous quote marks. And there’s his either understated or obvious puns (when he left his wallet in his pants and washed his pants, he got his money laundered), his inventive neologisms (“cliterature,” for women’s self-help sex manuals), and his insightful word play (on the same page, his one-word book review of the 1972 bestseller, “The Job of Sex.”). And there’s his sarcasm and iconoclastic humor that underlies all his writings. I imagine that whenever he was at work at his typewriter, he always wore a devilish grin. Unless he was being a jokester, Abbey did say that he preferred to be called not a nature writer, but a humorist. As a humorist, Abbey occupies the same high perch as Mark Twain. By no small coincidence, when our antihero Henry travels through Hannibal, he visits the Mark Twain Museum.

In the spirit of “Huckleberry Finn,” our first modern American novel, Abbey wrote “The Fool’s Progress” as his crowning achievement and gallant last effort at penning his own Great American Novel. I venture to say that his effort succeeded, but with my reservations about two chapters, Chapters 1 and 4.

Chapter 4, “The Rites of Spring,” is about a boyhood baseball game among local yokels. I find baseball to be the most lackadaisical of all team sports. You spend half the time standing around doing nothing on the field while waiting to get your hands on a ball, and the other half of the time sitting around doing nothing while waiting to get your hands on a bat. The only thing more boring to me than the inertia of playing baseball is the lethargy I feel from watching others playing the dang game. Reading about playing baseball should be even more monotonous, yet I found this game played by the hillbilly boys enjoyable and exciting. It is a dramatically written narrative with flourishes of humor and dashes of irony. Still, the entire chapter is totally irrelevant to both the book’s progress and the Fool’s Progress. This chapter-long digression instead should have been published separately as a short story. If you’re no fan of baseball, simply skip the game and skip the chapter.

Chapter 1, “In Medias Res” (“In the Middle of a Narrative”), is true to its title in that it too can be skipped. My own compelling reason for wishing it away is that it embarrasses me as a male. In light of our post-Me-Too-movement society, most females and many males will be repulsed by this chapter about Henry’s final quarrel and separation from his wife, Elaine. Reader Advisory: in order to spare yourself from all the flagrant displays of male chauvinism, I wholeheartedly recommend that you gloss over the pages wherever you see Elaine’s name. Also, during its opening scene, a drunken Henry shoots their refrigerator (instead of her?). This shooting is the only unrealistic scene in the book. Henry taking aim at a TV would have been more credible. In fact, in real life and when sober, Edward had done exactly that, shooting one dead center right through its shiny, nearly-square, black screen. To readers’ misfortune, the Elaine chapter greets us as the opening chapter of the book. If you insist on reading Chapter 1, else you be alienated and read no further, you should read the first chapter last. Indeed, I just happened to do just that.

If a book is not worth reading twice, it was not worth reading once. This is my second time reading this worthwhile book. The first time I read Abbey’s “big fat masterpiece,” as he called it, was in 1988 when it was hot off the press and, having read nearly everything else he had written, I was hot for anything new by Abbey. During my recent second reading, I read it chapter-by-chapter backwards, the same way I read Abbey’s “Desert Solitaire” for my second time. (According to Kierkegaard, life is lived forwards but understood backwards.) Having finished rereading “The Fool’s Progress” 34 years after my first reading, that’s one human generation later. Like the novel’s protagonist, Henry, I was revisiting my past, and part of my past was my deep love of Abbey’s writings. My love has survived the test of time. I still love this book and still love Edward Abbey.

Will his literature endure the same as Mark Twain’s and still be read a human generation from now? I argue to the court of public opinion that this book that inspired me to write this lengthy review, and that equally motivated you to read this review, indeed will outlast us both. When I first read the final pages of “The Fool’s Progress,” I broke down in tears. I mourned because of the book’s doleful conclusion where Henry dies and ascends somewhere akin to Heaven, though only in the hallucinatory imagination of a delirious dying man. Also, I cried tears of joy in retrospective awe of the entire book’s profundity and immense beauty that I held in my hands and had just witnessed with my eyes.

After first reading Fool’s Progress soon after its publication, I wrote Edward Abbey a fan letter, which in 1988 meant a postal letter, in which I told him I hoped he was not indeed dying of a terminal illness as was his alter ego Henry in the book, because I wanted him to continue to live so he could continue to write, he replied with a handwritten postcard postmarked February 3, 1989, and promptly died of a terminal illness 5 weeks later on March 14, 1989.

Upon my second reading, I again shed tears of joy, so my weeping might serve as a measure of the novel’s endurance. I mourned not because I did not want Henry to die, but because I did not want the book to end.