Russell Burrows' review of Jay Boyer's Richard Brautigan
English
by Russell Burrows?
For the last fourteen years, Wayne Chatterton and James Maguire have steadily expanded the Western Writers Series. Its fifty-page pamphlets have become widely recognized across the western region as concise, reliable, and inexpensive sources of information. Not infrequently, the series is the single dependable collection of scholarship that can be found in bookstores and libraries of outlying neighborhoods. And in a couple of instances, the series offers the best coverage that can be had on up-and-coming or obscure writers. Although the prescriptive format of the series does not always comfortably accommodate the diversity of the writers, its synopses of their lives, short analyses of their works and short critical overviews generally prove to be serviceable.
(...)
Jay Boyer's opening note makes us think that he'll take a sympathetic view of Richard Brautigan, whose "star had fallen". But Boyer doesn't evoke our feelings for Brautigan. Instead, his subject quickly emerges as an egomaniac, and the wonder is that one of his wives or friends didn't shoot him before he shot himself. The dark shades of Brautigan's personal life contrast sharply, therefore, with the value that Boyer willingly grants to Brautigan's work. Boyer writes that contrary to popular opinion, Brautigan "was not an author who knew what he was doing for a novel or two and then lost sight of it." But the proof of that claim is hard to see, since by Boyer's own admission, Brautigan began as a post-modernist, and then as his career went into eclipse took up traditional forms. Where the tendency of those who contribute to this series is to focus on the writers' themes, Boyer is more concerned with Brautigan's unusual style. And indeed, the best parts of this pamphlet are Boyer's explications of Brautigan's poetry and prose. These few very close readings, more than Boyer's general commentary, effectively argue that Brautigan was more than a fling that a generation of college students had with one who briefly spoke to them.
Western American Literature? 23(2)
August 1988: 156-158
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