Hayduke Lives! by Edward Abbey (review)

372 Western American Literature Kevin Starr. Jakes, who makes his home on the East Coast, also traveled west to complete his research. Despite his efforts, his story lacks believability. The dramatic episodes are contrived and the dialogue is stilted. The literary device of linking Mack and Carla’s fevered physical attraction with the hot santan winds is unintentionally silly. California Gold suffers from the weakness of characterization that is com­ mon in popular historical novels. Perhaps the one exception is the protagonist’s first wife, Carla Heilman, who is transformed in the course of the novel from a sensual woman into a blowzy drunk. California is, of course, the main subject of the book. It is the Promised Land of abundant beauty and resources that invites exploitation. Environ­ mentalist themes dominate the story and even John Muir makes a brief appear­ ance. Unfortunately, Jakes lacks the authentic voice of a western writer, and the novel fails to project the reality of the California landscape and its inhab­ itants. In the Afterword Jakes confesses his “sadness in looking at present-day California.” He finds it “the exemplar of the quintessential American ruin.” The prominent use of violence together with the author’s pessimistic attitude create a contradiction between the text and the statement which the text is meant to represent. As a consequence, the reader is left unconvinced by the aging Mack Chance’s final realization that hope and promise are the real “California gold.” KAREN S. LANGLOIS California State Polytechnic University, Pomona Hayduke Lives! By Edward Abbey. (Boston: Little, Brown &Company, 1990. 308 pages, $18.95.) Hayduke Lives!, Abbey’s final work, is a rip-roaring sequel to the equally vigorous and profane The Monkey Wrench Gang of 1975. HL! is a clever latter-day mock western shoot-’em-up in the lands of the Latter-Day Saints— southern Utah and the north-of-Grand-Canyon part of Arizona, the Arizona strip. The main characters are the same eco-terrorist gang of four, now some four or maybe six or eight years older:George Washington Hayduke, ex-GreenBeret eco-warrior out to stop at all costs the greedy, rapacious march of “pro­ gress” upon his beloved desert and canyon country; Seldom Seen Smith, fortyish river-runner-guide, jack-Mormon and polygamous husband with wives in three different Utah towns; Doc A. K. Sarvis, late fiftyish medical man and secret financier of this non-organized eco-terrorist cell;and his beautiful young Bronx-born wife, Bonnie Abbzug-Sarvis, still sexyof course though now mother of a three-year-old son Reuben, with another baby on the way. The Earth Firstlers are also there, led by the sensuous statuesque Erika from Norway. And Reviews 373 there isof course the comic Quixote figure, the lone ranger (without any Tonto —otherwise how could he be indeed a lone ranger?), the mysterious shadowy presence who finally is identified by Hayduke as the aging surviving Jack Burns from Brave Cowboy (a link identified well in the May 1989 WLA by Paul Bryant in “Edward Abbey and Environmental Quixoticism”). The enemy of course are personified in: the caricature Mormon bishop Dudley Love, builder, real estate man, car dealer, heavy equipment lessee and uranium developer; the FBI-CIA men, the Colonel and his henchmen, Hoyle and Doyle, who spy on the MWG, attempting to capture and thwart them, especially the most “productive” member, George Hayduke; Bureau of Land Management Rangerette Virginia H. Dick, representing the blindness of gov­ ernment blindly supporting the destructive technocracy; and of course the primary evil character, the monster machine, the 13,000-ton Giant Earth Mover, GOLIATH, which comes lurching across the country, scraping it bare for strip mining and road building while drawing down enough electrical energy to power 75,000 TV sets. Naturally GOLIATH becomes a symbol of all the destructive aspects of modern technology and of course becomes the obvious ultimate target calling the aging Monkey Wrench Gang out of retirement for one last try. And you have to admit that Abbey devises his story well, to get you rooting for these terrorists and bringing down GOLIATH in the most dramatic way possible. Abbey also works in humorous self-deprecation...