Flash player not available.
Click on the covers for more information on the different editions, including their availability.
If you cannot view the image, download the most recent version of Flash Player
by Kenneth Atchity?
Fans of Richard Brautigan will find this experimental novel disappointing; his literary biographers will find it curious. What Brautigan refers to as "the oddpaths of imagination" are not as odd, nor even as pathlike, here as they are in his best works.
Trout Fishing in America, The Hawkline Monster and the delightful stories contained in Revenge of the Lawn establish Brautigan's credentials as a unique cross between Kafka and Mark Twain?. The humor is wry, the voice is of uncertain distance from sometimes banal, sometimes surreal, events. The style is always terse and generally constructed with the fine precision of successful one-liners.
Traces of the familiar ironic self-deprecation can be found in So The Wind: "His parents really loved him./"I could tell by the way they talked to him./"My mother just barely tolerated my existence ... Once in a while she would go through short periods of intense affection toward me. It would always make me quite nervous and I was glad when she went back to just tolerating my existence."
At other times, the whimsical atmosphere of nostalgia dives headlong into the maudlin: "Also, old people just tended to like me. I had a quality that appealed to them. Maybe they liked me because I was interested in them and listened to what they had to say. It could have been that simple."
Throughout the story, based on the narrator's most traumatic childhood experience, Brautigan inserts a refrain: "So the Wind Won't Blow It All Away/Dust ... American ... Dust." For a stylist whose trademark is subtlety and ironic understatement at the most dramatic moments, the refrain becomes increasingly heavy handed.
Despite failure to hold matters together, the ghost of Brautigan past makes its presence known. The death scene is skillful and effective, and shows the promise otherwise missing in the experiment. The slow-motion action recalls his ability to let us observe comedy in the making: "The dock itself was three 10-inch planks that were about two inches thick. They were also hand-carved and then finely polished until a king could have eaten off them. It would have been interesting to watch a king eat directly off a dock."
In The Hawkline Monster, Brautigan gave us a character obsessed with counting, in the footsteps of earlier characters obsessed with trout, watermelons or Kool-Aid. This time the narrator presents his autobiography as though it were nothing but the memory of obsessions — with beer cans, funerals, fishing, hamburgers: "The only thing that was my fault was that I didn't buy that hamburger. If I had only wanted a hamburger that day, everything would have been completely different."
We realize that an obsession is no more than a system, and a system is subordinating everything in experience to a single thing.
Some systems work, others fail. The narrator looks over the obsessions of his past and realizes they've failed to help him overcome the greatest trauma of his childhood. The only system that works only works when it's allowed to be true to itself, despite the pain that causes memory.
"A lot of bad things happen to people in this life they just don't want to be reminded of, so they move away and try living someplace else where they can forget unpleasant things ... and start all over again and build up some good memories."
Trauma becomes obsession becomes memory becomes diminished vision and fragmentd soul. Obsessed with his memories, the narrator seeks to exorcise them with this record. The refrains, as he circles in on expressing the pain, haunt him — even if they don't successfully haunt us.
Los Angeles Times Book Review?
September 19, 1982: 8.
Copyright note: My purpose in putting this material on the web is to provide Brautigan scholars and fans with ideas for further research into Richard Brautigan's work. It is used here in accordance with fair use guidelines. No attempt is made regarding commercial duplication and/or dissemination. If you are the author of this article or hold the copyright and would like me to remove your article from the Brautigan Archives, please contact me at birgit at cybernetic-meadows.net.
![[toggle]](javascript:icntoggle('mod-Brautigan_Resourcesl2','module.png'); "[toggle]"){kind=small}