The Red Caddy

Reviews / Votes

An unflinchingly honest writer addresses the death of his friend and kindred spirit Edward Abbey . . . Abbey lives within these pages, which Bowden wrote in 1994, shortly after the conference on Abbey. This belated publication should not only send readers back to Abbey, but also back to Bowden's work. A memoir about an American original by an American original, a literary journalist who merits more than a regional readership. (Kirkus) Bowden, a journalist and author who died in 2014, knew Abbey better than most, perhaps, and attempts to paint a picture of the southwestern iconoclast in The Red Caddy. Discovered on his computer after his death, it's a fascinating artifact that's by turns charming and maddening - just like Abbey himself. (NPR) [Bowden and Abbey] were kindred spirits-desert rats who wrote with beauty and power, and curmudgeons who tended to view our current state of humanity as spiraling the sink. Bowden looked up to Abbey, but he didn't let that get in the way of telling readers how his friend Abbey was, like all of us, a jumble of contradictions. The gruff anarchist had a delicate ego and he could be childlike in his spite. In Abbey's later years, the avowed environmentalist zoomed the desert in a gas-guzzling red Cadillac and saw little wrong with this pleasure. Bowden warns about turning the dead into saints, but he also can't deny that Abbey's spirit lives on. (Outside) With its elegant prose and uncompromising vision, this is vintage Bowden. (Arizona Daily Star, Southwest Books of the Year) The mind of Bowden, and Abbey within it, make for a compelling source of vision and wisdom...honest, biting. (Southwestern American Literature)