The Last American Man

It is a rarity nowadays when I actually read a book cover to cover. My reading time is spent as follows: work-related BS, news outlets, New Yorker. Lately I can’t even count the NY as actual reading, more like an attempt to read and comprehend something while simultaneously falling asleep. Soon I will be illiterate and walk the streets as a mindless drone, voting Bush into a second term.

Sorry … so … it is with great personal pleasure that I can report I read a book cover to cover and am reporting on it!

Elizabeth Gilbert turns in a fine tome about a guy who actually succeeds at his true life wilderness livin’ lifestyle as opposed to the subject of Jon Krakauer’s Into The Wild. The two books are similar in subject matter, but diverge at the point where Gilbert reveals the thesis she’s trying to prove (and effectively does) about the loss of the frontier bringing about the eradication of the American self-made man. Except for this one dude, Eustace Conway.

Conway’s life is almost unbelievable. He left home at 17 to live in the woods and has been there since, acquiring land and trying to spread his message of self sufficiency to others. Gilbert does a great job of getting all angles of this story, but encountered some criticism after the book was published for leaving the narrative kind of open-ended, without much of a conclusion to the book. Those critics miss the obvious point: Eustace Conway is still alive and is still a very conflicted person and Gilbert has enough restraint and style not to predict the future for American readers who want their endings nice and neat. I salute her for that.

You can find Conway’s website here, but it doesn’t look like it’s been updated since 2002. It will at least give you some pictures to accompany your thoughts on what he looks like and where he lives. Good read.

Posted by k-pho at January 22, 2004 9:50 AM