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The Eden Express
- A Memoir of Insanity
- Narrated by: Pete Cross
- Length: 9 hrs and 53 mins
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The Eden Express
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Summary
Mark Vonnegut set out in search of Eden with his VW bug, his girlfriend, his dog, and his ideals, but genetic predisposition and a whole lot of shit going down made him crazy in a culture that told him mental illness is a myth and schizophrenia is a sane response to an insane society.
Describing his experiences during the late '60s and early '70s, Eden Express reveals how Mark went from being a recent college grad who was in love and living communally on a farm - with a famous, doting father, a cherished dog, and a prized jalopy - to having nervous breakdowns and then, eventually, emerging from them to write this book and to find the meaningful life that had - for a while - seemed out of reach.
But the real story here is that, throughout his harrowing experience, Mark's sense of humor let him see the humanity in what he was going through and that his gift for language let him describe it in such a way that others could begin to imagine its utter ordinariness as well as the madness that we all share.
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Average customer ratingsReviews - Please select the tabs below to change the source of reviews.
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Overall3 out of 5 stars
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Performance5 out of 5 stars
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Story2 out of 5 stars
- Cliff Moyce
- 06-03-23
A game of two halves
One of the one-star reviews on Goodreads asks “Where were the editors?”. Where indeed. Rarely have I read a book with such a poor first half followed by an increasingly good second half. Yes, many books get better as they go on, but this is too stark, and I can see why many people do not finish the book.
In the first half, Mark recounts his life post-graduation from a liberal arts college, post receiving an inheritance, post the career of his famous-writer father going stratospheric, in which he and his girlfriend decide to ‘drop-out’ and set up a self-sufficient hippy community in British Columbia. However, readers will realise that Mark is a phoney. He hangs around with college drop-outs and uses the phrase a lot, but he and his girlfriend were careful to graduate before their experiment. Similarly, he lets people assume he takes drugs like LSD when in fact he doesn’t (which is a good thing). He also has the financial resources to cover the fact that they never really become self-sufficient. Sadly, he also expresses sympathy for mass murderer Charles Manson. By this stage it is clear that he lacks self-awareness to a huge degree, and is unaware that he is a privileged, entitled, white, upper-middle class, whiney brat who never takes responsibility for his actions or give thanks for his lucky position in society.
In the (much better) second half of the book he becomes mentally ill. His writing here becomes increasingly moving as fear sets in and about something over which he feels he has no control. I had some doubts about the diagnosis he received at the time, and he addresses those same doubts in a post-script at the end.
Why the editors did not try and balance the book better, is beyond me. There are now many books on the lived experience of mental illness that are far better and more useful than this one, but as one of the earliest examples of the type I feel it remains a useful historical comment on the understanding of mental health in the times the 1970’s.
The narration is superb btw.
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