A gang of desert outlaws wage a reckless, irreverent war against the machines carving up the American Southwest.
The Monkey Wrench Gang is the novel Abbey wrote when the arguments from Desert Solitaire had cooked long enough to turn into fiction. Four people — a Vietnam vet named Hayduke, a Mormon river guide named Seldom Seen Smith, a doctor, and a Jewish New Yorker — form a loose gang that spends the novel disabling bulldozers, cutting billboards, and plotting, across hundreds of pages, to take down Glen Canyon Dam. They never pull off the big job. But the book is not about whether they pull it off. The book is about the specific kind of love for the desert Southwest that would make four otherwise-reasonable adults decide that moderate political action was not going to be enough.
Abbey is in full voice here. The prose is looser than Desert Solitaire, the rants are longer, the jokes are broader, and the love of the landscape is so unmistakably earned that you can forgive the book a lot of its rough edges. Canyon country is rendered with a care that the plot mechanics don't slow down — the red-rock drainages, the river camps, the specific feel of the highways between Moab and Hite — and the environmental destruction the gang is fighting is described with an anger that does not thin out. It is still there on the page when you look up from the book.
I bring this up at the fire when somebody starts a conversation about the ethics of direct action on public lands. The book is not a manual. It is not even, exactly, an endorsement. Abbey is a better writer than he is sometimes given credit for, and the gang members are not uncomplicated heroes — they are ridiculous in specific, deliberate ways, and the book is partly a comedy about how sincere political anger can tip into absurdity. That complication is the thing most polemics about the book miss.
What the novel gave the American West is a specific archetype — the monkey-wrencher, the principled saboteur, the person who has decided that the land is worth personal legal risk. That archetype traveled. Earth First! picked it up and ran with it. A generation of environmental activists named themselves after Hayduke. The influence is real and not altogether controllable, which is partly Abbey's fault for being funny enough that the joke could be mistaken for the recipe.
Read it after Desert Solitaire, not before. The essay book tells you why the novel had to exist. Without the philosophical groundwork, the gang's escalating vandalism is just vandalism. With it, the novel becomes the specific, comic, angry sequel to an argument Abbey had been making for years, and the argument is what makes the slapstick land.
