Product 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."

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #260801 in Books
• Published on: 1998-08-15
• Original language: English
• Number of items: 1
• Binding: Paperback
• 528 pages

Amazon.com Review
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
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 g run by his brother; penniless, Henry has nowhere else to go. PW found this "as absurdly moving as anything you have read in years." (July)Penny, do you have a copy of this?robin
Copyright 1990 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.

Customer Reviews

Astonishing last autobiographical novel
Edward Abbey died in March of 1989. In the latter part of 1988, he saw his last and perhaps most accomplished work brought to bed at his publishers in New York. The author of many highly controversial works of fiction and non-fiction, best known for his seemingly solitary stand against the ecological destruction of the western American deserts, Abbey's last book effectively completed a cycle. At the same time it was a very close foretelling of his own probable doom.

Abbey was an environmentalist from the beginning. In the East of his youth, he saw strip mines close in on his father's mountain acres. Out West, he witnessed the early preparations being made to dam the Colorado and its tributaries. He rafted down Glen Canyon and saw the hidden valleys filled with a beauty that was soon after to be engulfed. He smelt out the tricky political deals being woven by senators and landowners in the forgotten tracts of the butte country and did his best to expose them. Against all of the attempts to tame this corner of the American wilderness, Abbey railed.

In books ranging from "Desert Solitaire" (1967), a journal of a season in the desert, to "The Monkey Wrench Gang" (1975), an explosive novel of saboteurs versus dambuilders, Abbey argues his points in favour of preserving the canyon country. Having been there "before" and "after," his voice has a compelling authority. To read his account of Glen Canyon before the dam is to be filled with regret at the later spoliation.

In "The Fool's Progress," Abbey gives us something of a summing up of his own life. The book is like a reverse history of Kerouac's "On the Road." Instead of youth rushing out through the length of America to meet its new and cosmic identity on the West Coast, here is a life which is wearing down, attacked from within, going back from the desert to the Appalachian hills of birth and ancestry. In the chronicle of the winding down, as the truck begins to fail and a mortal pain begins to rise, boyhood is measured against the actual experience of the now hard-bitten adult.

"The Fool's Progress" is the work of a now accomplished writer in his prime. We might have expected much more from Edward Abbey and his early death is a great loss. Nevertheless, his completed works stand on their own and I can recommend them to anyone who is intrigued by the workings of an original mind as it tackles the problems of our age.

Best book I've ever read.
Being an avid reader, I've read all of the "great works" -- from Socrates and Plato to Steinbeck and Hemingway -- and this is the best fiction/philosophy that I've ever read. Abbey's discriptions of his travels and laments are first class -- funny, honest, and down-right on the mark. When I met Henry Lightcap in chapter one, I wanted to know who he is and how he became to be. At the end, I cried for a man that I came to know and love. Although I love and respect many of the great works of the west, this is the most incredible novel I have ever read. I re-read this book at least once a year -- it's a wonderful journey, never a chore. If I could recommend one book out of the multitudes I've read, this would be the one. And the only.

Truth.
Life. Death. Love. War. The life-long struggle away from what you are towards what you might be, if only..., or the struggle back to what you were. Read this. Read the rest of the reviews below. Then shell out twelve bucks and buy this book. When it arrives at your door, dedicate a few hours in an out-of-the-way place. Keep those that you love handy. Keep your spirits up, life is one kick in the groin after another and this tome is no different. It's a long, hard race kids. No one wins or loses, we simply end up carrying our stinking dying dogs the last few miles home.

I sent this book to my mom when she asked me why I thought the way I did. A few months later I got the best letter of my life.