In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:

  • On the Border, on the Edge: Charles Bowden’s Twinned Trilogies
  • David N. Cremean (bio)

Click for larger view
View full resolution

Michael P. Berman. TIRE, TRUCK, AND WELL. PALOMAS, CHIHUAHUA. 2007. Photograph. Reprinted with permission from the artist.

[End Page 428]

Works Reviewed

“Divine Tragedy” Trilogy

Bowden, Charles. Inferno. With photographs by Michael P. Berman. Austin: University of Texas Press, 2006. 176 pages, $45.00.
———. Exodus/Éxodo. With photographs and afterword by Julián Cardona. Austin: University of Texas Press, 2008. 285 pages, $50.00.
———. Trinity. With photographs by Michael P. Berman. Austin: University of Texas Press, 2009. 260 pages, $55.00.

“Underground History” Trilogy

Bowden, Charles. Blood Orchid: An Unnatural History of America. New York: Random House, 1995. Cloth. / New York: North Point/Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1995. 298 pages, paper $15.00.
———. Blues for Cannibals: The Notes from Underground. New York: North Point/Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2002. 293 pages, $24.00.
———. Some of the Dead Are Still Breathing: Living in the Future. Boston, MA: Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, 2009. 243 pages, $24.00.

“A literary career should be not a career but a passion. A life. Fueled in equal parts by anger and love,” sermonized Edward Abbey (“A Writer’s Credo” 176). Author Charles Bowden lives his late good friend’s vision of such a writing career. Whether in general conversation or as advice, Bowden always emphasizes living with passion. I have heard him do so to others, had him do so to me. Publishing irregularly early in his career, over the past fifteen to twenty years, and in particular the last decade, Bowden has produced books and articles prolifically in a variety of high quality venues, investigating and at times diagnosing the diseased hearts of the Americas, especially those of the United States. As I have noted about him in previous reviews, Bowden is a literary prophet, primarily in the sense of calling society to account. In fulfilling this prophetic office, however, he has also compiled an impressive and haunting predictive record as an essentially dystopian futurist, a counter–Buckminster Fuller or –Alvin Toffler. “I am what they bought, the prophet of all our bad ways,” he [End Page 429] tells us in Red Line (1989, 26). The two trilogies discussed in this essay as trilogies certainly continue the two-tined prophetic function among other of Bowden’s related trademark practices. The six books continue and expand not only Bowden’s entire canon but also recast and reinform each other now that both series are complete.

A generation younger than Abbey and Kurt Vonnegut Jr. and roughly a half generation younger than Hunter S. Thompson, Bowden could well qualify as his generation’s major American contrarian. Subjects he has written about are as quotidian as Chicago, cooking, wine, and gardening; as controversial as Gary Webb, Charles Keating, and dying small towns in western North Dakota (perhaps his most controversial article yet); as quixotic as tilting at immigration practices and policies in Australia and North America and Dennis Kucinich’s run for president. Yet Bowden’s primary focus has long been the Southwest, a region he experienced as a youth, adopted as home as an adult. Over the past twenty years in particular, his work has tended to focus on explorations of the US-Mexican border, what we gringos in our patented brand of hubris usually term “the border,” as if it were the world’s only one or at least the only one that matters. Most recently he has been preoccupied with Juárez and the illegal drug industry. Yet the diversity implicit in Bowden’s work—from Killing the Hidden Waters (his first published volume, in 1977) to Blue Desert (1986), from Frog Mountain Blues (1987) on through the various overarching, yet diverse concerns of Desierto (1991), and from Juárez: The Laboratory of Our Future (1998) to his masterpiece, Down by the River (2002)—paradoxically shapes itself into a mysterious and living unity.

These six books, exemplary of most of his oeuvre, can be classified as “literary journalism” or as “literary nonfiction.” Coupled with his prophetic nature, his substantial literary gifts separate him from solid and stolid run-of-the mill authors of nonfiction...

pdf