Review: The Monkey Wrench Gang, by Edward Abbey

So, I’ve mentioned the Monkey Wrench Gang  a couple times already, but now that I’m through with it I might as well put a few thoughts together by way of review. What an entertaining book! It’s its own strange mix of humor and melancholy, hope and defeat, beauty and crassness.

Dubbed by Larry McMurtry as the Thoreau of the American West, Abbey can paint effortless word pictures like this one…

“He remembered the real Colorado, before damnation, when the river flowed unchained and unchanneled in the joyous floods of May and June, swollen with snow melt. Boulders crunching and clacking and grumbling, tumbling along on the river’s bedrock bed, the noise like that of grinding molars in a giant jaw.”

… and a minute later, refer to a truck’s “seared differential scrota” without batting an eyelash. The biggest coups he manages to pull off, though, are the well-drawn, memorable characters: the loveable Jack-Mormon river guide, the crude PTSD-stricken Viet Nam vet, the refined and aging surgeon, the beautiful yet aimless female Brooklyn transplant, and of course, the stunning, forbidding, alluring canyon country of southern Utah and northern Arizona, which is perhaps the most important character of all. Even the villains jump off the page and make a deep impression.

There’s plenty of pastoral contemplation coupled with truckloads of surprise and suspense, and the whole time the reader is drawn right into the characters’ eco-activist conspiracy. There are cliffhangers (like, literally) and a surprise ending that made me want to go right out and buy the sequel. (There really is one!) Anyway, I highly recommend it.

Literary Devices with Edward Abbey

A couple choice excerpts from Abbey’s The Monkey Wrench Gang:

“They roared down the high-centered road, bristly blackbrush and spiny prickly pear clawing at the truck along the greasy perineum of its General Motors crotch.”

“The enemy, only a few miles behind, out of sight but closing the gap, spurred on with extra vigor by the indignity of singed bottoms, scorched automotive coccyges, seared differential scrota, would soon come round the last bend in the trail and see them—Hayduke and Smith, Inc.—crawling slow and beetle-like up this improbable exit way.”

Gotta admit, the man has a way with words. Of course, the technical  term for this literary device is "anthropomorphization." And for those interested in further study, its commercial application, can be explored here.

"Seldom Seen" Sleight?

One of the books I’ve recently placed a hold on at my local library is Edward Abbey’s The Monkey Wrench Gang . Not necessarily a literary classic, mind you, but I think it’s a book most people would put in the western canon. No, not thatWestern Canon , but the canon of important works set in and about the American West.

Anyhow, last night I’m reading my college alumni magazine (Go Utes) and I stumbled across this profile of the man who was the real-life inspiration for “Seldom Seen”  Smith, the ringleader of Abbey’s ragtag group of fictional environmentalist misfits. Though he’s still alive and well, retired river guide Ken Sleight isn’t spilling the beans on how much of Abbey’s tale is based on actual events. But I still get a kick out of discovering the truth behind the fiction…