All the Wild That Remains: Edward Abbey, Wallace Stegner, and the American West by David Gessner (review)

In his new book tracking the ghosts of Edward Abbey and Wallace Stegner across the American West, David Gessner jokes that readers in the urban East commonly mistake Abbey for the playwright Edward Albee. The same mistake might be made about Gessner himself, a prolific and gifted writer of creative nonfiction whose books have generally treated eastern landscapes such as Cape Cod and the Charles River corridor outside Boston. In All the Wild That Remains Gessner demonstrates his chops in the West, where he has done a superb job deepening our understanding of two of the region’s literary giants.

Gessner is not a biographer, though his command of these two remarkable literary lives is impressive. He is not a scholar, though he has studied everything each man wrote, even camping out in the Abbey archives in Tucson and among the Stegner papers in Salt Lake. He is not a travel writer, though his book is rich with road trip narratives that make you want to leave the cubicle behind forever. Especially engaging are Gessner’s visits with folks who knew these writers personally. For example, Wendell Berry’s graceful commentary on Stegner and Doug Peacock’s profanity-laced riff on Abbey are priceless. While Gessner’s travels are often pilgrimages to sites important in each man’s life, he is a pilgrim who is nevertheless suspicious of the literary fanaticism that has grown up around these writers—particularly around Abbey, whose cultural status resulted as much from his iconic and iconoclastic environmentalism as it did from his books. One of Gessner’s accomplishments is the way he strikes a difficult and necessary balance, expressing genuine, insightful appreciation for each man’s work while avoiding both the antiseptic bloodlessness of some scholarly writing and the emotional excesses of hagiography.

The success of All the Wild That Remains is also attributable to Gessner’s deft handling of the fascinating comparison between Stegner and Abbey—two writers who function as the magnetic and yet opposing poles of the book’s narrative. There are compelling commonalities in the two stories: both men were ambitious writers, committed environmentalists, and strong voices for the American West. However, while Stegner was a devoted husband and father, a dedicated teacher, and a man whose brand of environmentalism depended upon cooperative strategies, Abbey had five wives, was cynical about most institutions (including universities), and adopted an anarchic, direct-action style of environmentalism that gave rise to Earth First! It is also instructive to examine the narratives of these two lives at their point of convergence in 1957, when Abbey was a student of Stegner’s at Stanford. From there the routes diverge, never to intersect again, and yet the lives run in provocative parallel paths that Gessner explores in depth.

Reading David Gessner’s engaging take on Wallace Stegner and Ed Abbey is like having a new friend reintroduce you to old friends. Gessner is above all a writer observing writers, and as a writer who is capable of Stegnerian lyricism and grace as well as Abbeyesque wit and irreverence, he is particularly well suited to the task.