The Fool's Progress

by Edward Abbey

The Fool's Progress, the "fat masterpiece" as Edward Abbey labeled it, is his most important piece of it reveals the complete Ed Abbey, from the green grass of his memory as a child in Appalachia to his approaching death in Tuscon at age sixty two. 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.""A profane, wildly funny, brash, overbearing, exquisite tour de force." -- The Chicago Tribune

Genres: Fiction, Novels, Travel, Nature, Environment, Literature, Contemporary

528 pages, Paperback

First published January 1, 1988

About the author

Edward Paul Abbey (1927–1989) was an American author and essayist noted for his advocacy of environmental issues, criticism of public land policies, and anarchist political views.

Abbey attended college in New Mexico and then worked as a park ranger and fire lookout for the National Park Service in the Southwest. It was during this time that he developed the relationship with the area’s environment that influenced his writing. During his service, he was in close proximity to the ruins of ancient Native American cultures and saw the expansion and destruction of modern civilization.

His love for nature and extreme distrust of the industrial world influenced much of his work and helped garner a cult following.

Abbey died on March 14, 1989, due to complications from surgery. He was buried as he had requested: in a sleeping bag—no embalming fluid, no casket. His body was secretly interred in an unmarked grave in southern Arizona.

Reviews

[Matt · Rating 5 out of 5]

Recently, a group of my guy friends decided to form a book club. One reason: all our wives were already in one, and we felt the need to exercise our own intellects. The real reason: the NFL is over for the year, and we needed an excuse to drink beer on Sunday. (An excuse other than “it’s Sunday!”).

In the abstract, I should love being part of a book club. I like reading. I like talking about what I’ve read. I like to drink. It seems a no-brainer. However – and this a big “however” – I hate being told what to read. It causes me to flash back to the trauma of high school English, where a succession of teachers peddling a succession of impenetrable, unwarranted classics, nearly strangle-choked my once-strong love for the written word.

I have two shelves groaning with stacks of unread books. Book I want to get around to reading. Joining a book club was an exercise in relinquishing control.

The upside – I discovered Edward Abbey’s The Fool’s Progress.

Before the fateful day – our book club’s inaugural event, where we got drunk and chose the first book – I’d never heard of Edward Abbey. My natural self-hating side wants to deride my own ignorance, but I’m not really to blame. There are millions of books and just as many authors. The herd is culled by a small elite of tastemakers, so that the same one hundred books end up on the Greatest 100 Books list every time that list gets made. The rest of the time, I get my literary recommendations from Amazon, based on a complex algorithm that utilizes my browsing history and purchasing history and then reaches its hand into my wallet and takes the money I need to buy diapers.

I shouldn’t be surprised it took me this long to find The Fool’s Progress. I’m just happy I found it at all. My newfound love of this book is that special alchemy of the joy of discovery and the appreciation of great quality.

The semiautobiographical The Fool’s Progress is the story of Henry Holyoak Lightcap, an Appalachian boy turned soldier, philosophy student, welfare officer, and park ranger. He is a nonconformist, a blowhard, a functioning alcoholic, and a serial philanderer. One of the supreme achievements of this novel is finding the vulnerable soul buried deep within the irredeemable jackass.

The novel takes place along two different timelines. The narrative backbone is set in the book’s present, sometime in the 1980s. In this storyline, Henry has just watched his third wife Elaine storm out of the house, leaving him for good. Henry shoots his refrigerator, packs his few belongings (including a hose for siphoning gas), and gets into his pickup truck (joined by a dying dog) for a cross-country journey back to Appalachia and his brother Will.

Henry’s trip, fueled by an ever-present six-pack, takes him along deserted back-roads and through small, forgotten towns. He spends his nights in dingy motels or camped on the roadside beneath the stars. Along the way, he stops to bid farewell to old friends, whose help Henry adamantly declines.

The second timeline is a series of chronologically placed flashbacks to Henry’s life that are interspersed throughout his eastward passage home. The flashbacks begin with Henry’s childhood, in Stump Creek, West Virginia in 1927, and covers his life all the way up to the present day, gradually revealing the entire course of Henry’s tumultuous life (along with some of the mysteries as to why he is who he is). The scope of this second timeline is truly epic. It takes you from the scrubby Lightcap farm in West Virginia coal country, to the battlefields of World War II Italy; from the streets of a grimy, pre-corporatized New York City to the pristine beauty of America’s National Parks.

The structure of The Fool’s Progress is fairly standard in its coupling of a road trip with flashbacks. This probably won’t be the first book you’ve read in which an aging man moves forward while looking back.

Here, the quality is the thing. I’ve never read anything else by Edward Abbey (as previously noted), but his talent leaps off the page. This book is the product of an author at the height of his powers, in control of his material, who is utterly confident in the way he's going to tell the story. When he wants to switch between the first-person point-of-view to the third-person point-of-view on the same page, he does it. When he wants to describe an entire sandlot baseball game between competing West Virginia towns, he devotes a chapter to the affair:

There is a certain unmistakable sound that ballplayer and fan recognize instantly, as if engraved on memory and soul among those clouds of glory on the other side of birth, beyond the womb, long ago before conception when even God himself was only a gleam in a witch doctor’s eye.

The sound of the long ball.

All faces turned toward the sky, toward the far-flung splendor of an Appalachian sunset, and saw Red’s departing pellet of thread, cork, rubber and frazzled leather rise like a star into the last high beams of the sun, saw it ascending high, higher and still higher over Jock Spivak’s outstretched despairing arms in the remotest part of center field, far above the fence, over the trees and beyond the creek, where it sank at last into twilight and disappeared (for two weeks) in the tangled fodder of Mr. Prothrow’s cornfield.

Sonny Adams followed by Elman Fetterman came trotting across home plate, dancing in delight. Blacklick 21, Stump Creek 20, Stump Creek 21. The home team swarmed with joy around the runners, waiting for the last and winning run.

But where exactly was it? That winning run? Where was Red? Red was nowhere. Red was everywhere. Red stood in front of home plate leaning on his bat, watching his first hit of the game vanish into immortality somewhere southwest of Stump Crick. Run? he said. What the hell do you mean, run? Hit’s a home run, hain’t it? What the hell I gotta run round them goldamn bases fer? He spat a filthy gob of tobacco juice into the trenched soil at his feet, shouldered his bat in disgust and strode down the red-dog road, headed for Ginter’s hollow…

There are times when the writing is a bit too precious, exuding a certain smugness of ability. Mainly, though, I was uniformly wowed. The dialogue is sharp. The characterizations are memorable. There are gorgeous descriptions of nature. There is a profound melding of the bitter and the sweet, moments that are near laugh-out-loud funny, and moments of sadness that will steal your breath. Abbey peppers his story with audacious set pieces – a requiem of war in Italy; a manic day in a New York City welfare office; a family funeral – that are entirely different from each other in tone, setting, and content, yet act together to envelop you into a fully-formed story. As wild and fantastical as Henry’s life is, it feels like a real life.

I could go on. I could take all day listing my favorite scenes. There is a romantic interlude during the novel’s final third that absolutely blew me away. It was passionate, quixotic, almost discordant with the rest of the novel; yet Abbey’s story – his conceptualization of Henry Lightcap – depends on this interlude working. And it does. Everything in this book works. All the different threads and stories and characters who weave in and out like the stitches of a quilt. The Fool’s Progress is an instant all-timer on the mystical bookshelf in my brain.

There is always something more to make of a book. Certainly there are probably a dozen themes running through The Fool’s Progress that I blithely missed (according to Wikipedia, it’s about a man’s “refusal to submit to modern society”). Henry has a lot of opinions that he isn’t shy about sharing, and many of them are probably the opinions of Edward Abbey, whose own life provides the skeleton for Henry’s.

I connected with this book on a much simpler level. It’s funny and heartbreaking and ugly and beautiful and it’s profane and tender and light and dark. Life is all those things, so a good book about life has to include them too.

[Harper · Rating 5 out of 5]

Edward Abbey is a dirty old man. Backwoods, racist, sexist, libertarian, dirty old man. I love him. I would proudly have his babies.

This may be the best summary of this book ever.

Really it's beautiful. Makes me homesick for the desert and the kind of rugged individualism and anti authoritarianism that Abbey represents so well. Makes me realize that coming home is a powerfully healing thing to do.

[Numidica · Rating 4 out of 5]

This is a hard book to rate. Abbey is at his best when describing nature, or his love of nature, or his love of baseball, or his sentimental memories of growing up in rural America (in the book, West Virginia, in reality, western PA). Many parts of the book are laugh out loud funny, and Abbey's writing is entertaining most of the way through. But his dislike of cities devolves into something approaching racism, and his description of women must be viewed through the lens of how he actually lived. Abbey was a serial philanderer, and was not good to his wives, by the accounts of both the ex-wives and his friends. His constant cultural references (to philosophers, musicians, authors) seem almost the nervous tic of a man suffering from a lack of confidence in his education, though I'll admit he sent me to Wikipedia a few times to look up this or that obscure artwork or author; in the end, those parts of the book are not the strongest. And his protagonist's constant drinking (again the semi-biographical nature of the book) makes the more temperate among us shake our heads, even if we can relate. And yet....his love of wilderness strikes a chord, deeply, with those who share his love of the outdoors. I have not read Desert Solitaire, considered by many his master work, but I will when I have time, because I do share his love of the woods, nature, wild things, and wilderness. And Abbey's writing flows easily for the reader, so there's that.

3.4 stars

[L.G. Cullens · Rating 5 out of 5]

Review of Edward Abby's The Fool's Progress
[paragraphs in italics are snippets from the book]

Warning: Edward Abby's writing, and possibly my take of it, may anger some. There are some bits of the story where even my annoyance flared. Understandable, being our species is saddled with the Achilles heel of subjective perception, inherited in our evolution.

Nevertheless, this is an exceptional literary accomplishment ranking up there with the best I've read, and the best of Edward Abby's writing. It is a story of intermingled journeys, one a coming of age, one a flight from an age, and one of coming home — the journeys also evocative travelogues replete with our repeating history. The story is at once full of hope and heartbreak, anger and empathy, excess and prudence, pride and shame, innocence and understanding — in short a depiction of real life. His writing ranging from humorous to sorrowful to infuriating, but ever illuminating and sobering. What more could a reader ask for? I had to stop reading at times, especially in the ending scenes.

What may grate on some, if they recognize it, is that the gist of the story is Abby showing us through Henry Lightcap and other characters what hubristic, genetically manipulated, hormone controlled beings we are — not all bad nor all good in our tortured souls. Abby is self-admittedly flawed, but even so is a much needed iconoclast, crying out as we hasten our pace to the abyss.

There is no pain, Camus said, which cannot be surmounted by scorn.

Like my review, the story seems to ramble on in places, but there is a stratagem to the conveyance, complete with nuances, that brings it alive with meaning. It's a story that accumulates over the chapters of occurrences and recalls, like viewing Henry Lightcap's life through a prism of influences. Single chapters are but components, and with their intensity can be distracting. One engrossing chapter starts out with the lead-up to a bedroom scene (distracting for the moment from how Henry got there), segues abruptly to a meeting with his thesis committee about the preparation of his master’s thesis (and you maybe thought Robert M. Pirsig got carried away) and concludes with a house warming in every sense.

What he really wanted, perhaps, was to ride a horse through the primeval forest while composing poetry—a verse in the wilderness!—or guide timid but willing young lady tourists up mountain trails toward the giddy summit of their mutual desires.

“The important thing, I think,” said Henry, “is to avoid succumbing to cynicism—to that weary resignation which passes, in the decadent West, for wisdom and wit.”

Consummate writing skill I believe, I enjoyed his frank in-your-face style laced with nuances, thinking I understand what in good part lies behind his rants and satire, and his reluctance to participate in the status quo quagmire. We tell ourselves we're an intelligent species (the irony of the Homo sapiens label we adopted), despite our actions evidencing otherwise, digging our grave ever deeper at an accelerating pace. The crux of his disagreeable tangents also evidenced in how some readers, loath to contemplate our true proclivities, take offense at his varying broadsides — balanced in my view allowing himself to often enough be the brunt. I see it as him parodying shared human attributes, indeed of many species as we're all connected. Could he be right in us being the only species that contemplates our mortality and reacts with instinctive ignorance — I'm not convinced of the former. I do know that Nature isn't concerned with our human viewpoint of oft misapplied right and wrong, steadfastly moving on with the continuum of physical life in transitioning new life forms to balance changing environments. All species alter their habitat to degrees, for good and bad as seen from our human bubble viewpoint, but none so far beyond our weedy species that I know of have altered the course of physical life so quickly and completely.

My views, of course, influenced by a naturalist's perspective. One that understands the distaste of human anthills, one more in line with a reverence of natural world balance for the benefit of all, not any one individual, one that believes the hell part of it all could be mitigated with more wisdom and respectful coexistence. Does eating with a knife and fork distinguish us from the ignorance of primal savageness? Viewing Abby's writing as at times a naturalist's Saturday Night Live with nuances to spare, the reader may broaden their perspective. It can't hurt to blend a bit more illuminating reality with our head-between-our-legs, zombie, shoot-em-up, and what-have-you entertainment reading :-)

“Your criticism is greatly appreciated,” says my Uncle Jack’s business card, “but fuck you all the same.” He deals in fertilizer.

I know, when a man’s best friend is his dog that man needs help—professional help. I understand that and I acknowledge it and I say to hell with it.

Jesus loves me, that I know,
’Cause the billboards tell me so.

[re: Henry's older brother overseas during WW II]
“But”—Paw would continue, ruining the effect, spoiling his case with his patient neighbors—“Will and those boys should be going to Wall Street, New York, and that Washington, D.C., not to Europe. That’s where our real enemies are.”

Some insightful tidbits that struck me earlier on, leaving out hilarious passages that were too long to include and/or might reveal too much.

Back on the road, after a perceptive description of the the Painted Desert (Navajo country) Henry drops in on an ailing old friend.

“Henry,” he says, “what’s the most horrible thing that could happen to a man?”
“I don’t know. A night in bed with Margaret Thatcher?”

Later in the visit, when Henry asks where the word Indian for Native Americans might have originated, his friend answers with a tidbit of history our colonist culture turns a blind eye to.

“Los gentes in Dios,” Don repeats. “And that’s what Columbus wrote in a letter to Ferdinand and Isabella. In the next paragraph he offered to bring their majesties a shipload of ‘inDios’ as servants and playthings. ‘They have few and simple weapons,’ he wrote, ‘and conduct warfare only as a game.’ With a handful of men, he said, meaning Spaniards not inDios, he could easily enslave the whole population of the Caribbean and put them to useful work, like mining gold and silver.”
Jenny says, “I always wondered if that name Colón [Cristóbal Colón, Spanish for Christopher Columbus] doesn’t have a close connection to asshole.”

Ah yes, and have we really changed? Judge for yourself in all the news that isn't news.

I open the newspaper. Routine frontpage stuff: the perpetual Mideast crisis, some movie actor running for the U.S. presidency, more murder and massacre in Afghanistan, Guatemala, Cambodia, Chile, El Salvador, etc.—same old ancient news. I turn to the inside pages, the human interest material: “Man Knifed on South Bean St.”…“Mother Convicted of Drowning Deformed Baby; Right-to-Lifers Demand Death Penalty”…“Man Riddles Giant Saguaro with Shotgun Blast, Is Fatally Injured When 5-Ton Cactus Falls on Him”…
There is a God.
I read on. “Chief Engineer on Dam Project Killed by Lightning; Same Storm Washes Out Coffer Dam”…
And a Just God he is.”

Back on the road again, Henry reflects on other tidbits of history.

North of town I see a pair of small hills: Rabbit Ear Mountain, the early travelers called it, the first topographic feature to meet their eyes as they left Oklahoma headed west toward Santa Fe. Josiah Gregg stopped here for a drink (of water), losing his pistol as he leaned over the horse trough. An unlucky fellow, that Gregg—the Ichabod Klutz of frontier America. Not far east of here he was once pursued by a wildfire for ten miles across the plain. The fire began at his morning camp, making Gregg the only man in American history to be chased by his own campfire.

We stop for a while, a piss for me, a bowl of water for my dog, at a place named Cow Creek. Coronado also paused here, in 1541, before giving up his search for the Seven Golden Cities of Cíbola and turning back toward Texas, New Spain and Old Mexico. Coronado recognized the potential of the Kansas plains, a region, he said, “capable of producing all the products of Spain.” He had his mounted soldiers with him, baking in their tin suits, and a priest named Juan de Padilla. Padilla returned to Cow Creek—then known as Quivira—a year later to christianize the Indians. As if they weren’t dangerous enough already.

Love his wit :-) Think about the nuances and you will find many insights.

Henry had a sick imagination, obsessed with history. Aloft in his tower too long he’d been reading too much Gibbon, Mommsen, Acton, Toynbee, Becker, Wells, Braudel, Prescott, Beard, Wittfogel…. Torture, massacre, slavery, peonage and serfdom, rank and caste and hierarchy, the nightmare unfolding for five six seven thousand years or ever since the first Pharaoh hissed, uncoiled and rose like a hooded cobra from the slime of the Nile and our hydraulic tyranny began its self-perpetuating growth.

Each particle indeterminate and unpredictable but the aggregate bound tighter than a bull’s asshole in flytime to the iron laws of probability. As Henry would have phrased it, composing his footnote to Plato

Scattered amongst all this are the wisdoms of practical folks.

Will and Marian had their first child eight months after the wedding, the second two years later. That was enough, even though Marian was a Roman Catholic. The Pope may be infallible, she explained, but he’s never around to help pay the bills.

Maybe Abby spends a little too much time exemplifying our hormonal proclivities (Henry Lightcap was a randy old goat), but not out of proportion with reality. Henry has a lust for life, seen through subjective romantic delusions. And how are we essentially any different?

Those mountains. That river. That land and his friends and this absurd garment of irritation, aspiration, intuition, irrational reason, inconsolable memories that he wore as symbol of life. Death would be better, sweeter, simpler. But death like anybody else must wait his turn.

If you chose to, I hope you read this book with an open mind, and find much of value in it.

[Christine Boyer · Rating 5 out of 5]

Wow! A funny, emotional, thoughtful, exciting, romantic, gritty, real journey of one man's life. I had never heard of Edward Abbey until a friend recommended this book. I guess he was a bit on the extremist "radical" side - pro nature/anti industrialism type who had somewhat of a cult following in the 70's & 80's. So I wasn't sure if I would like this novel. It is now on my list as one of my all time favorites.

The writing is excellent, with so many memorable lines. Also, good weaving of the back story with the current plot. The main character is very rough around the edges, though, and I suppose he might be too much for a dainty reader. But I loved him, and I could (scarily!) relate to him many times during the story.

[Lucy · Rating 1 out of 5]

Apparently, Edward Abbey is an environmentalist whose books have been known to inspire radicals but also open up frank discussions about the treatment and protection of the western landscape. All right. That's one point of view. I can respect that.

But, this was not the book to start with. I don't know if he's a great author or not, but, supposedly, this book is autobiographical and I can tell you, if it is (he's dead...so it's all speculative anyway) that I don't like him. Completely self-indulgent and apparently moral-less, I'm not interested in his addictions or inability to commit or his lassez-faire attitude when it comes to love, work and person hygiene.

The writing is, I admit, good, but I'm a story girl...and the story is....bad.

You'd think he'd endear himself a little by calling himself a fool. By being so blatantly honest. But it only shows off his self-indulgence and egocentric perspective.

A Fool's Meandering is more like it. I witnessed no progress here.

[Owen · Rating 5 out of 5]

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.

[Michael Thoeresz · Rating 4 out of 5]

This is one of the funniest books I've read in a long time.

"Like him I'll get shitfaced fallingdown snotflying toilet-hugging drunk. Reality management."

"And why? What's my problem? Well, I have this queer thing about pretty girls: I like them. And this weird thing about steady jobs: I dont like them. I dont believe in doing work I dont want to do in order to live the way I dont want to live."

"The word itself--skirt--excites im instantly. There is something about that airy garmet, he feels, that delectable ambiguity of concealment and accessibility that makes it, of all femenine accessories, the most maddening device for torturing men ever invented."

"I was a philosophy major. That's why I'm totally confused. Ask me a question, I think of sixteen possible answers, all false. The result is a kind of infantile paralysis."

[Michael John · Rating 5 out of 5]

Having been a long time Abbey fan, I finally decided to read his "masterpiece." I have read his nature writing and most of his novels. It would not be an exaggeration to say that Edward Abbey has had a profound impact on my life. I read The Monkey Wrench Gang when I was 16 working on trails in the backcountry of Yellowstone and I have never looked back.
With that intro, I have to admit that this was not my favorite of his works. But when you admire and enjoy a writer's voice so much, even works that don't touch you as directly are amazing. I have always loved Abbeys little sayings which are, as usual, sprinkled throughout the narrative. And his descriptions of the natural world that serves as a stage for Henry's journey is, as usual, unparalleled.
But now for the million dollar question: what about his treatment of women? Yes it can be problematic for some. However, through his many relationships in his many books, including this one, there runs a thread of tenderness and hopeless romanticism. That is why I love his novel Black Sun so much. It is also why I found his relationship with Claire one of the most heartbreaking passages that I have read in years. There is a pattern for Henry as well as Abbey; romantic pining, temporary but blinding happiness, devastating heartbreak, and then full scale retreat to the natural world. To me it is completely believable. But I believe, as I suppose Abbey does from my reading, that the ultimate consolation, the ultimate hope, lies in the natural world.

[Allison · Rating 3 out of 5]

I thought this book was hilarious, which has led me to question my morals.

[Elaine · Rating 4 out of 5]

Great writing about a misogynistic asshole, unredeemed.

[Larry Bassett · Rating 5 out of 5]

It’s been a while since I’ve stayed up late so I could finish reading a book. But it isn’t even 2:30 in the morning so it isn’t really late and I experienced this book by listening to it in the audible version rather than reading it in print. I think I remember that it was first published in 1988 and it didn’t get to audible until 2018. Still catching up.

This is a Strange book that leaves me with a bit of a lump in my throat at the end. I left some notes scattered through my reading, and I hope that Goodreads has somehow made them available, because they were certainly brilliant and insightful.

The main character in this book is somehow both obnoxious displaying multiple isms, like sexism and racism and much else. And yet he is also lovable and dedicated to life. There are several deaths in the book and they will not necessarily surprise you, but they will still leave you with that incredibly sad feeling even though you could see it coming.

This is a really long book and somewhat strangely put together as far as the order goes. 22 hours of audible, listening. I guess it took a long time to cover the thirst for life that the author wanted to convey and in real life the author was a environmentalist, and probably not at all a racist and sexist and homophobic asshole! So why did he put all of that stuff in the book? Got me.

[Keturah Lamb · Rating 5 out of 5]

Andy sent this to me this summer with the explanation that it was his favorite novel. It's one of those books you gotta read in the right frame of mind: you can't be feeling any sort of bitterness toward men, it's helpful if you have time to read it at leisure, and reading it when you're in a good mood will go a long ways, too. Thankfully I didn't read this book before meeting Andy or I may not have had as much sympathy for the main character, a man afflicted by his lusts, with little desire to cultivate any sort of self-control. There's a sort of pitiable arch to his story as he seeks to live in voluntary poverty as a poet, philosopher, and lover... to be let alone to enjoy life, to remember his childhood, and to know the faithfulness of those that love him. The story is told from the main characters' memories as he takes one last cross country roadtrip.

[Ryk · Rating 5 out of 5]

This is not a review. Not yet.

What I remember at the time is that this book scared the crap out of me, even as I enjoyed it. Because it showed me how out-of-sync I was with myself, my life, my sham first marriage- everything.

I'm picking it up to re-read, as my life needs the shake-up this book delivered the first time, and after 13 years, it will be a different book because I'm a different person.

[Callie · Rating 4 out of 5]

I both love and hate Edward Abbey. I would love to only love him.
I probably could, if I had stopped at Desert Solitaire and Monkey Wrench Gang.
But then I had to go ahead and read The Fool's Progress.
It is hard to admire him when his sexism is off the charts. Also, his racism.
I'm not going to say a lot more about that.

I still love the way he writes and I love/hate his cantankerous soul. He has a terrible attitude.
Best of all, I love the way he writes about places I know.

[Zoe · Rating 1 out of 5]

I was stuck for two days on Amtrak with this book and I got to page 153. The moment I stepped off the train I would have thrown it into the trash, except it was a library book.

[Cody Boese · Rating 5 out of 5]

It was funny, it was sad, it was offensive, it was heartbreaking, it was beautiful. His best work

[Nicole · Rating 5 out of 5]

Abbey hits all of his strengths over the course of this novel--waxing poetic about pristine landscapes, waxing poetic about women, railing against institutions and commercialism...and it's all wrapped into a classic epic journey format, reverse-Kerouac style.

Henry Lightcap is sarcastic and cantankerous and, in all honesty, comes across as an alcoholic misogynistic asshole, at least in the beginning of the book (when we first meet him he's shooting his refrigerator because his third wife left him again), and these things make him both funny and frustrating. He gives us at least a dozen neat little nuggets of life philosophy over the course of the book, but here's the earliest one I noticed: "What's my problem? Well, I have this queer thing about pretty girls: I like them. And this weird thing about steady jobs: I don't like them. I don't believe in doing work I don't want to do in order to live the way I don't want to live." This is how Henry thinks, and this is how Henry lives. On one level it's completely unacceptable in modern society--this man will never be dubbed a "team player" by his coworkers--but on another level it lives up to the honesty promised in the novel's subtitle. It may be an unappetizing truth for some, but it is Henry's truth and he refuses to sugarcoat or apologize for it. And you know what? Good for him.

I know, it’s hard to go from “misogynistic asshole” to “good for him” in a single paragraph, and in reality it doesn’t happen in a single paragraph. Henry is compelling from the get-go, but one of the great successes of this book is to make this crass and self-absorbed and melodramatic and angry man so complex and sympathetic and just ridiculously and completely human that by the final chapters he’s got your heart in his fist.

There are a couple things besides Abbey’s general awesomeness that this book leaves me wanting to ramble on about, or maybe they are just a couple of the specific ways in which Abbey is awesome. First, Henry goes crazy with the literary references and philosophical meanderings throughout the book. It’s not really that unusual for a fictional character to be aware of existing literature and other fictional characters, but Henry takes it to a pretty impressive level. He weaves his awareness of these into his own inner monologues and everyday interactions with anyone and everyone, regardless of whether they even get the reference. And I’m sure there are dozens that went right over my head, because so many of them are slipped in there on the sly, easy to just take at face value within the context of the story if you don’t know what work he’s referencing. It’s all very slick and smart and I love it because even though I might be missing more than I’m getting, every single time I get one makes me feel smart, too.

Finally, the title. A good number of the literary references are from Shakespeare, and that got me thinking about the title and where the fool fits in and then what the progress is (if there even is any besides the obvious west-east movement). I haven’t sorted this all out in my head yet, but Shakespeare’s fools often (always? Find me a truly foolish Shakespearean fool, I’m not sure there is one) are the least foolish characters around, dispensing little nuggets of wisdom to all those around them who are too busy being self-important to see the wisdom for what it is until the final act. Because Abbey gives the book the title he does and then lets Henry go to town with the lit refs, I wonder if he wants us to make the link between Henry and Shakespeare’s fools. And I wonder what it means if he does. Henry is wiser than we think he is? Wiser than he thinks he is? Thinking about this makes me want to read the book all over again.

[Charlie · Rating 4 out of 5]

I love Abbey because he is tough nut to crack, and a hard drink to swallow. He can be downright offensive, but it's important to see his distaste is not limited to women and Mexican's but leveled fully against all participants in society not excluding his autobiographical character Henry H. Lightcap.

The autobiographical nature of this novel helped me untangle a bit of the contradictory, larger-than-life image Abbey has here in the west. Reading it after Loeffler's biography was helpful.

I don't think I loved the book until the last hundred pages. I kind of toughed out the first two-thirds of the book. It's a thick book for that kind of effort. I like to think that had something to do with Lightcap/Abbey's stubbornly thick skull.

A lot can be said about the roughness, forcefulness, indelicacies, and blunt rejection of flowery language in Abbey's prose. It's hard to stomach at times, and refreshing counter to a lot of other writing at others. It's definitely Abbey's and hard for his accolites to mimic without cheapening.

[jeremy · Rating 5 out of 5]

edward abbey may be america's most underappreciated writer. he is well-deserving of mention amongst our country's literary titans (whitman, emerson, thoreau, twain), and, thematically speaking, his works were as prescient.

short of abbey's journals (confessions of a barbarian) or his letters (postcards from ed), the fool's progess may be the most candid glimpse into his life. subtitled "an honest novel," this is still a work of fiction, but many of the events depicted mirrored abbey's own real-life experiences. as with any writer of prodigious merit, abbey had mastered the craft of weaving wit and wisdom into a rousing narrative. often funny, often forlorn, ed abbey was truly alive, and this vitality was abundant in his philosophy, his storytelling, and his ability to portray believably nuanced characters. a masterwork.

[Matthew Chisholm · Rating 5 out of 5]

This novel was the most gripping I've read in a very long time. I've been obsessed with the Edward Abbey/Wallace Stegner literary exploration of the American West for a while now. I've made it my pledge to flip-flop from one author to the author until all of their catalogs are exhausted. What I didn't expect with this novel was to see so much Appalachia in Abbey's narrative. I knew that this novel was to be Abbey's unofficial autobiography, but I didn't foresee just how much pain and beauty of Abbey's life would bleed into his normal cynical take on almost everything. This whole effect is firmly cemented in the last 100 pages of the book as Henry Lightcap (Abbey) walks destroyed and dying, dragging his dog in a duffel bag, just to get back home to be with his family one last time. Abbey's genius is making us feel just how precious but ferocious our humanity truly is.

[Lara Stilling · Rating 5 out of 5]

Oh boy. You can try to hate Henry Lightcap as much as you want, but it is a fool's errand. I am as anti-misogynist, anti-glutton, anti-male-worldview as they come, but I love this book. It is a testament to honesty, that no matter how ugly, the truth is always better than the lie. Henry is honest about all his ugly parts from the get-go, and it's amazing how difficult it is to judge an honest man. I love a book about a "journey," and this one might just be the best. No coincidence, I'm sure, that Abbey saved this one for the end.

[Geoff Gadow · Rating 5 out of 5]

Absolutely Abbey's best novel. I love the Monkey Wrench stuff, but Fool's Progress takes Abbey's writing to a whole other level; a personal one. All of Abbey's work is autobiographical on some way, but this heart-wrenching and profound look at the experience of life and death is as close as he gets to true autobiography. And, yes, it's his best novel for that exact reason.

[Betsy · Rating 5 out of 5]

This is also one of my favorite books. I loved the main character - eventually. At first I was a little skeptical, but then he started to grow on me. I cried through the last ten pages. The misadventures and landscape of this novel are images I hold as close as some of my own.

[Brian · Rating 5 out of 5]

Semi-autobiographical. Entirely hysterical and heartbreaking all at once...it brings to life the old saying, 'Everywhere i go, there i am'. This is my favorite book of all time.

[Brendan · Rating 5 out of 5]

This is an absolutely beautiful book, a meditation on life and death and everything in between as only Abbey could tell it.

[Saleh MoonWalker · Rating 3 out of 5]

Onvan : The Fool's Progress - Nevisande : Edward Abbey - ISBN : 805057919 - ISBN13 : 9780805057911 - Dar 528 Safhe - Saal e Chap : 1988

[Leland · Rating 3 out of 5]

I gave this book a 3 star rating. This might misrepresent my fondness for Edward Abbey. I first read Desert Solitaire in 7th grade and it was a mind-opening experience. However, Fool’s Progress — which was published the year I finished High School — is not by any means the best of Ed Abbey’s writing. He died the following year. The characters are frozen in a time when men who worked hard at being misogynistic dipshits were celebrated a cultural beacons. There were numerous moments of cringe The hero, Henry Holyoak Lightcap, is a semi-autobiographical, self-professed existentialist who takes great pride in his refusal of modern social rules. This at moments endears, but the devil is in the details. In the end I felt like Lightcap was too similar to too many men of my father’s generation. Men who made a great deal of their rugged independence. Men who left a trail of broken families and personal disasters. Many of the characters in books like The Monkey Wrench Gang escape this criticism because they are infused with a sense of radical purpose. Lightcap lacks such a purpose, so we judge him not for his mission, but for his behaviors.

[Nicole Balbuena · Rating 4 out of 5]

Really good.
Dudes crazy as hell.
Incredibly romantic (not in the love way except for one part)
Very philosophical, sometimes too much.
I really enjoyed it and at some points really wanted this life

[Sean O'Brien · Rating 2 out of 5]

oh brother, this guy STINKS!