All The Wild That Remains: Edward Abbey, Wallace Stegner, and the American West

This book is a bit of a genre mashup. Gessner reads (almost) all the books of Wallace Stegner and (Stegner’s briefly student) Edward Abbey. He then drives around the country, visiting these authors’ haunts, talking to their friends and family, and (lightly) reviewing their works and adding his own reflections as a writer and lover of wilderness.The travelogue is much more urban than wild. Aside from a rafting trip, Gessner doesn’t share wilderness experiences with us. In fact, the longer experiences are the oil boom town of Vernal and some time in Salt Lake City archives. One of my favorite parts was his conversation with other writers of nature – notably Wendell Berry in Fort Royal, Kentucky, Terry Tempest Williams near Moab, Utah, and Doug Peacock in Paradise Valley, Montana.Indeed, one of the real challenges we face is that too many of us who talk and write about wilderness do so from urban homes. After all, Cactus Ed Abbey wrote Desert Solitaire in Hoboken, New Jersey. Gessner writes from Wilmington, North Carolina. That’s a challenge we all might ponder.Regardless of place, this is a great book that should be of interest to a wide range of readers. Gessner writes well, and his reflections on these writers are helpful. I know some of all five of these writers’ works, and it was good to learn more about their entire oeuvres. With the other writers, I also gained a renewed sense of place in environmental writing.

As a result of reading "All the Wild," I'm motivated to read more of Abbey and Stegner, particularly "Desert Solitaire" and "Beyond the 100th Meridian. As for Gessner, he ties the two together well, but he sometimes inserts a bit too much of himself or gets breathless about one or the other of his subjects. Hence, this book must be seen as more of a memoir and a meditation than a critical examination of the two writers. There is plenty of examination and the research to back it up, however, and it is a very worthwhile read. Living in the West, as I do, I can perhaps more deeply appreciate Gessner's environmental concerns and arguments and equally deplore the fact that any writer living and focusing west of the Hudson River is viewed as a regional author by too many readers, critics and publishers. The section on Vernal, Utah and the fracking debate are illuminating and troubling.

This book, like so many others of Gessner’s books, is not about nature, nor about ED Abbey and Wallace Stegner, not really. But about writing, or the search for a model of what it means to be a writer, and Gessner’s own very American desire to find for himself a model that embraces both liberty and union, Pluribus and Unam, the law and the spirit, civilization and the wild. Towards the end, we even catch him writing about writing about writing Ending spoiler: he never does reconcile the irreconcilable. He ends up giving his readers no answers. But as a good teacher should, he does help clarify the questions. Readers of Gessner’s earlier books will recognize the themes. His first essay in Sick of Nature details his admiration for his English Prof at Harvard, Jackson Walter Bate, a man he clearly looked up to as a teacher and model. Likewise with John Hay, The Prophet of Dry Hill. Another writer model. So here with Ed Abbey and Wallace Stegner. But here the model is split in twain, the older Stegner representing science, reason, logic, the work ethic and Abbey, despite himself, a child of the 60s embracing the mystical, the wild, the forbidden. Theologians know these two types as the Arminian and the Antinomian, one a believer in law and logic, the other a mystic following ones own private drummer. Or, as he puts it “Saint Wallace the Good and Randy Ed, Wild Man.” Gessner’s book could have put his central conflict into its larger historical context and thus enriched the argument. But that would not have gotten him any closer to a resolution. Gessner sees the value of both Saint Wallace and Randy Ed and hopes, somehow, to reconcile them, to capture in his writing the best qualities of each. It is a noble if impossible task. One must say this for Gessner: in his efforts to become “a writer,” he has been successful, both in the many books he has published and in his ability to communicate in a clear, almost embarrassingly naked, prose that gives us the man writing as a real human being wrestling with the demons we all must face. In an age in which even “nature writers” have succumbed to the siren song of post-modern Francobabble, Gessner remains true to the old ideal that a good writer communicates clearly, writer to reader, soul to soul.Anyone interested in nature writing, in writing itself as a process, in America, in the West, or even in Abbey or Stegner will enjoy and learn from this book.

This a very graceful book that anyone who cares about wilderness should read. Gessner shapes his narrative around the work of two influential but no longer living writers—Wallace Stegner and Edward Abbey. Their work and Gessner's reading of it keeps this from being yet another gee-whiz travelogue about the West. It keeps him (and his readers) focused on a very fragile landscape and what we might do to preserve at lest some of it. Stegner, the older of the two men, grew up with a father always looking, unsuccessfully, for the next boom in the West. He supported himself and his family as a writer and teacher of writing (like Gessner). Abbey was among Stegner's students, as were Ken Kesey and Wendell Berry. Abbey was everything Stegner was not—wild, subject to mood swings, a womanizer and a user of various substances, legal and not so. (I think of Stegner as a fifties guy and Abbey as a sixties one, although they both lived longer than that. Activism was essential to Abbey, frightening to Stegner.) If you haven't read their work, this is a great introduction to it, and, as Gessner makes clear, the West is ever fragile and under worse pressure toward degradation than ever. My one quibble with this book is that, like much of the West, it's a bit sexist. Gessner emails Terry Tempest Williams but never actually meets her, and he prefers Stegner's faithful monogamy to Abbey's fecklessness, but he never really engages the environmentalist women of the West.

An excellent book. Might have been interesting to also include Muir, although he was from a different era of course.

Somehow, in 13 years of studying American literature, particularly that of the mid-twentieth century, I'd managed to overlook Wallace Stegner and Edward Abbey. In fact, I didn't even recognize either author's name when first looking at this book. I bought it entirely because of positive Amazon reviews. Yet now I feel compelled to go out and buy at least a few of each author's work. I'll also keep an eye out for more by David Gessner as I enjoyed this one greatly.His style of writing is a little odd. It took me a long time to figure out exactly what was going on. Is this travel writing? An environmentalist's screed and call-to-arms? A biography of Stegner and Abbey? A literary analysis of the Western canon? It is all these things blended together. It's a bit confusing and overwhelming at times, but engaging and informative at other points. Gessner hits his stride later when writing about his own travels with his daughter, in my opinion, although his details about Abbey are pretty much fascinating throughout.

I found this book very interesting and really enjoyed it .It's a good read