The Last American Man (Elizabeth Gilbert) (1.5/10.0)

I rarely have a visceral reaction to any particular book, and the reviews that are hosted here on The Literate Man will attest to the fact that I generally give (very) positive reviews, but The Last American Man by Elizabeth Gilbert really pissed me off. 

First of all, I should have loved this book. The subject is Eustace Conway, renowned mountain man of North Carolina, who took to the woods as a young man determined to lead a more simple and natural life, who hiked the Appalachian Trail in order to find himself, who spent months studying with the Maya in Guatemala, who went cross-country on horseback, and who ultimately established a primitive farm in the mountains of his home state. In fact, I feel a real kinship with the story of Eustace Conway, at least in broad outline. I grew up in the hill country of Western New York, where I worked horse and dairy farms, and spent many an hour hunting up arrowheads in the forests about my family's home. I, too, generally think that life is too complicated, too artificial, too sterilized, and that a return to a more simple existence is good for the soul. I too, spent several months hiking the Appalachian Trial during a break between college and law school. And I spent years living in Guatemala, trekking the spine of volcanoes that run the length of the country, and working with the indigenous Maya communities there. I should have LOVED the story of Eustace Conway; instead, I walked away from Elizabeth Gilbert's treatment feeling only pity for him and very much cheated by the promise of his story.

In titling her book, The Last American Man, Elizabeth Gilbert made a very tall and significant promise to her readers, namely that the story would reflect distinctly American values and otherwise reveal the embodiment of those values in a particular individual. Now, please understand that I have nothing against the man himself.  Eustace Conway is, from all that I know about him, a supremely competent and skilled outdoorsman.  What quickly becomes obvious in the book, however, is that Eustace spent the first half of his life suffering under and running from the harsh and autocratic rule of his father and the second half creating his own home (a primitive farm, known as Turtle Island), where he could draw young people in by the promise of a simpler life and then command and control them in precisely the same manner as his father commanded and controlled him. The rest of the book is no more than Gilbert's idealism of her subject and window-dressing.  In escaping his unbearable home life, Eustace Conway exchanged the yoke for the whip, but the system and the philosophy remain precisely the same.  Such autocracy is not an essentially American trait - indeed, it is precisely the opposite of a respect for individual liberty, a principle which Eustace Conway obviously abhors. A dedicated woodsman, he may be, but Eustace Conway is not in any way, shape, or form a paradigm of American masculinity.

And Eustace Conway is hardly the last of his kind, although he goes to great lengths to market and promote himself as the embodiment of American frontier principles.  Gilbert treats this self-promotion as part and parcel of what it means to be an American hero, pointing to the images that Daniel Boone and Davy Crockett, among others, created to enhance their public standing.  By doing so, she tacitly elevates every travelling evangelist and snake-oil salesman to the status of American folk hero.  But these traits are hardly uniquely American or disappearing in our time.  In fact, self-promoting, self-righteous, and domineering natures abound in every society around the world. And so, the promise of the book's title goes not only unfulfilled, but directly contradicted.  I can only conclude that the title was a misguided marketing effort to sell more copies of what is a decidedly flat, fractured, and uninspired tale of an otherwise skilled woodsman who has spent his life in trying to tell other American males (and females) how to live their lives, while he fails again and again to effect a life that is significantly different from that led by his father. He is, simply, one self-promoting autocrat seeking to escape the domination of another, which is hardly a unique story, much less an essentially American one.