Desert Solitaire was a missed opportunity for a great novel about the Moab desert and the national parks of southeastern Utah. It's staged as an autobiography of several months of the author's life when he was a park ranger. From what I read, Abbey had two objectives for this book. One was to create a pulpit from which he could drone on interminably about his existential musings and personal philosophy of life. (He is, by the way, the kind of atheist who likes to bluster about how religion is full of foolish ideas, as opposed to the kind of atheist who thinks everyone is allowed their own opinion.) But the other and most important objective was to inform the reader that the national parks in Utah have been ruined by the expansion of tourism, and nothing you see there will ever be as good as when he was there. Go if you want, but it will never be as beautiful as it was in the '60s, and he was one of the last and only people who got to appreciate it.
I think Edward Abbey is the kind of person from whom you'd immediately want to extricate yourself if you were to meet him at a party. One of the first examples of the kind of dickhead he is comes when he's describing a walk back to his camp: he spies a rabbit hiding under a bush. He picks up a rock, hurls it as hard as he can at the rabbit, striking it in the head and killing it. Rather than musing on why he did this or forcing himself to dress and eat the rabbit in exchange for killing it, he instead crows about "participating in the cycle of life" and leaves the rabbit for the scavengers, who will "appreciate it more". What a fucking asshole. It's one thing to be the cruel kid with the BB gun shooting songbirds for no other reason than the thrill of being destructive, but to then attempt to brag about it or justify it...and this guy was a park ranger! He was being PAID to be a steward of the wildlife in the park! He really, really needed a hunter or a hiker or a Boy Scout to come along and knock his teeth out.
I say the book is a missed opportunity because Abbey is a fine writer otherwise. His descriptions of the animals and plants and beauty of the park are excellent and detailed. There is a great chapter where he describes how conditions in the desert turned a murder attempt into a comedy of errors. Those moments were precisely what I was looking for in this book, but there were far too few of them to redeem what is otherwise just excerpts from the diary of an insufferable narcissist.
Yes, I concluded Abbey was kind of an asshole too. His love of the wilds was real, and his concerns valid, but he was also quite an elitist. He mocks the idea of wheelchair accessibility - only able-bodied people should be able to enjoy nature. And he recommends mandatory population control, especially for poor people. He comes off as a crank who writes well but probably wouldn't be very pleasant in person.
Desert Solitaire was a missed opportunity for a great novel about the Moab desert and the national parks of southeastern Utah. It's staged as an autobiography of several months of the author's life when he was a park ranger. From what I read, Abbey had two objectives for this book. One was to create a pulpit from which he could drone on interminably about his existential musings and personal philosophy of life. (He is, by the way, the kind of atheist who likes to bluster about how religion is full of foolish ideas, as opposed to the kind of atheist who thinks everyone is allowed their own opinion.) But the other and most important objective was to inform the reader that the national parks in Utah have been ruined by the expansion of tourism, and nothing you see there will ever be as good as when he was there. Go if you want, but it will never be as beautiful as it was in the '60s, and he was one of the last and only people who got to appreciate it.
I think Edward Abbey is the kind of person from whom you'd immediately want to extricate yourself if you were to meet him at a party. One of the first examples of the kind of dickhead he is comes when he's describing a walk back to his camp: he spies a rabbit hiding under a bush. He picks up a rock, hurls it as hard as he can at the rabbit, striking it in the head and killing it. Rather than musing on why he did this or forcing himself to dress and eat the rabbit in exchange for killing it, he instead crows about "participating in the cycle of life" and leaves the rabbit for the scavengers, who will "appreciate it more". What a fucking asshole. It's one thing to be the cruel kid with the BB gun shooting songbirds for no other reason than the thrill of being destructive, but to then attempt to brag about it or justify it...and this guy was a park ranger! He was being PAID to be a steward of the wildlife in the park! He really, really needed a hunter or a hiker or a Boy Scout to come along and knock his teeth out.
I say the book is a missed opportunity because Abbey is a fine writer otherwise. His descriptions of the animals and plants and beauty of the park are excellent and detailed. There is a great chapter where he describes how conditions in the desert turned a murder attempt into a comedy of errors. Those moments were precisely what I was looking for in this book, but there were far too few of them to redeem what is otherwise just excerpts from the diary of an insufferable narcissist.
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