Sick-Dog Blues

By John Skow

THE FOOL'S PROGRESS

by Edward Abbey

Henry Holt; 485 pages; $19.95

"Upon publication," the publicity blurb wretchedly announces, "Edward Abbey will tour the following cities: Los Angeles, San Francisco . . . New York and Washington." Why wretchedly? Because Abbey loyalists don't like to imagine their prophet -- that grand old desert solitary, that North American champion of the ideological beer-can toss -- getting anywhere near Los Angeles, New York or those other evil megaburbs. Somebody might package his crankiness for distribution in health-food stores, or subject him to relentless understanding on public TV.

A few decades ago, the author began working as a seasonal fire lookout and park ranger in outposts like Arches National Park in southeastern Utah. Out of these cherished stints of lonely brooding came such collections of marvelously cross-grained essays as Desert Solitaire and Abbey's Road, and that wistful novel of eco-banditry The Monkey Wrench Gang.

Henry Lightcap, hero of the present novel, is a freestyle philosopher and romantic crank, madly in love with the West as it used to be and waitresses and barmaids as some of them still are. He shares Abbey's employment history, his age more or less (late middle), his marrying habit (Abbey's present wife is his fifth) and his sour gallantry. His position on beer-can tossing is the master's: the highway is an abomination, and thus the litter that sullies it is a blow for truth and beauty.

Lightcap, alas, has fallen on bad times. His latest wife has left him for the usual good reasons, he and his job at the Tucson welfare office are irreconcilable, his charge-card credit has seized up, his old dog is fatally ill, and he has a gut ache that sounds bad. In this woeful condition he hits the highway, heading home to his older brother Will, who still tends the family farm in West Virginia.

Yes, folks, it's mournful country music that makes your blue eyes water. Call it the Sick-Dog Blues. Abbey, who must have written this on a banjo, not a typewriter, is feeling sorry for his hero and probably for himself too. What saves the book is that he is skilled enough to pull sympathetic readers into his own mood of regret, not just for long-gone youth and foolishness, but for small-town, big-sky Western life as it was before shopping malls and industrial parks ate the best of it.