Book Review - The Air Conditioned Nightmare

The Air Conditioned Nightmare
by Henry Miller
New Directions, 1970
Reviewed by William I. Lengeman III

One almost has to admire the sheer vitriol with which reviewer Orville Prescott savaged Henry Miller in the New York Times, in late 1945. Though he admitted that his subject was "not without talent," Prescott ultimately concluded that The Air-Conditioned Nightmare was "as shallow, snobbish, uninformed, pretentious and monstrously egocentric a book as ever I read in my life."

Miller, the expatriate, returned to the United States for a while just as World War II was getting underway. He proceeded to set out on a road trip, made in part with his friend, painter Abe Rattner. Miller was an unlikely candidate to write a road book, it would seem. For starters, he didn't know how to drive and had to take lessons before actually hitting the road.

"The only way to see America," Miller declared. "Is by automobile - that's what everybody says. It's not true, of course, but it sounds wonderful." Later, Miller claimed that he "had to travel about ten thousand miles before receiving the inspiration to write a single line. Everything worth saying about the American way of life I could put in thirty pages."

Just a few pages later and Miller denounced the automobile itself as the "very symbol of falsity and illusion." Later, as the trip was well underway, he began to warm to its charms and in the book devoted a substantial section to praising these.

It's a book that vacillates throughout, jumping back and forth between Miller's stinging assaults on those places and people he despised and his often overblown praise for those few of whom he approved.

In the former category was America itself - "the most productive nation in the world, yet unable to properly feed, clothe and shelter over a third of its population." Miller also ripped on Pittsburgh, bashed New York City ("the most horrible place on God's earth") and saved a measure of venom for St. Louis ("a foul, stinking corpse").

Those diverse things that warmed the writer's cranky heart - the Amish, the Cherokees of North Carolina, Tibet, the mystic Swami Vivekananda, New Orleans, the eccentrics of the Deep South, the paintings of the aging surgeon/artist Dr. Marion Souchon, and the trying discords of experimental composer, Edgard Varese.

One might wonder why Miller even bothered, given his belief that "the best books on America are the imaginary ones written by those who have never seen the country." But bother he did and the result is a work that jumps from intriguing passages full of striking imagery and use of language to tedious stretches that ramble on in bewildering stream of consciousness jags.

Worth a look, all in all, though readers expecting the folksy down-home style practiced by many road scholars might be advised to steer clear.

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