The Fool’s Progress, An Honest Novel.

New York: Henry Holt and Company, 1988. First Edition, stated. Octavo, navy blue cloth & gold boards (hardcover), 485 pp. Very Good+ in a Fine, mylar protected dust jacket. From dust jacket: The Fool’s Progress is the story of Henry Holyoak Lightcap’s uncertain advance through life, recounted during a 3,500 mile journey from the acrid wasteland of Tucson, Arizona, to the “green, fuzzy, mist-infested hills” of a fictional Stump Creek, West Virginia. The journey -- Henry is accompanied by his dying dog, Solstice -- takes place in April 1980; the life journey begins over a half a century earlier, with the “mishap of birth” continuing as a series of adventurous episodes, amorous and otherwise, ranging from West Virginia to Europe to western America and back. Icaresque in form, personal in style, unique in point of view, The Fool’s Progress can best and only be summarized, in the author’s words, as “an Edward Abbey kind of novel.” Nobody else could have written such a book. “A kind of outrageous comedy is central to the thematic body of Abbey’s work -- a freewheeling wililngness to be brash, satiric, excessive. His is a kind of gallows humor poised against the mechanized diminishment of the human spirit.”