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by Barbara A. Bannon?
The narrator in Brautigan's new novel is a melancholy 47-year-old man who looks back on the events of the year when he was 12 years old (1947-48: "post-World War II gothic...America"), and on the dramatic circumstance which, he repeatedly tells us, ended his childhood. Growing up in a series of small towns in the Pacific Northwest? as part of a chronically poor, fatherless family, young Whitey (he has an albino's coloring, symbolizing his outcast state) is drawn to eccentric characters in each community. He is a boy obsessed with death; from the time he was five and lived next door to a mortuary, he has seemed fated to be an instrument of mortality. Brautigan indulges in relentless foreshadowing to alert readers to the doom to come. The pervasively portentous, elegiac tone is employed in a style whittled to banal simplicity, albeit loaded with heavy symbolism. The result is a flat, listless narrative, enlivened fleetingly by Brautigan's bizarre imagination, but pretentiously self-important and contrived.
Publishers Weekly?
June 25, 1982
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