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Joseph Cohen's review of 'So the Wind Won't Blow It All Away'
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Fulfillment Elusive, Brautigan Reminds Us: A Review of So the Wind Won't Blow It All Away

by Joseph Cohen?

Gary Snyder once said that Richard Brautigan's writing consisted of "flowers for the void."

This new novel might be described as a small but flawless bunch of violets laid at the feet of the past in the cemetery of the mind. It is typical Brautigan, clever, entertaining, filled with the author's delight over the unexpected success of the images his combinations of words evoke, saturated with the milk of human kindness, sometimes corny, always whimsical, ever aware that his talents and good nature are inadequate defenses against the assaults of 20th-century life.

Chief among these assaults is the certainty of loss. From the beginning of his career, Brautigan has scrutinized that certainty in our consciousness. Whatever the abundance of life and the grasping for it, sustained fulfillment, he reminds us, is fairly elusive. Tragedies, minor and major, are usually our lot. That seems to be the way of the world.

At the close of his first book, "Trout Fishing in America," which established his reputation, the once teeming trout stream, like a used and abandoned car, its insides worn, ends up in a junkyard, to be sold piecemeal. In this most recent work, an empty rocking chair by a catfish pond, salvaged in the middle-aged man's memory of his boyhood, is all that remains of the nameless couple, long since dead, who brought their living room furniture nightly to the water's edge, to fish in comfort while the young boy looked on.

Loss in this minor key is merely the prelude to loss in a major chord. Life is bad but not all that bad for this fatherless waif who, when ignored by his preoccupied mother, finds his friendships in the summer mainly among old alcoholics, recluses and the nameless couple fishing from their makeshift living room. When the winter comes, it brings, with it the spectre of death which has stalked the boy from the age of five when he watched a child's funeral and realized its meaning.

Seven years after, the spectre catches up to him. The tragedy of that 12th year involves his accidentally shooting and killing his casual companion, a schoolmate, the town's brightest hope for the future, while the two of them are using rotten apples in an abandoned orchard for target practice.

Like the light breeze that played across the catfish pond in summer, the story is told simply, with Brautigan's teasing charm beguiling us across the pages, time present spun into past, past and future woven into the present, pregnant with foreboding.

The summer breeze is a diversion; it is the winter wind of this child's discontent that must be stayed if the true meaning of his disorder and early sorrow is to emerge. And emerge it does, for Brautigan's conscience, never far from the surface, directs us to the inescapable message, that whether we will or no we remain our brother's keepers, necessarily sharing guilt and responsibility; in this instance, for continuing a generations old but nonetheless outrageous custom of putting BB guns and .22 rifles into the hands of children as though it were a required rite of passage.

The deeply embedded guilt the boy turned middle-aged man feels 35 years later is not without redemptive significance. Brautigan's narrator attempts to set things right in a world long gone awry, if by nothing more than repeating his story, like the Ancient Mariner(external link). He is compelled to tell it "so the wind won't blow it all away." "Dust ... American ... Dust" out of the past it may be, but only through emphasizing this refrain — it occurs 10 times in the text — can he make us see the link between adult folly and the child's tragedy.

As in the Mariner's tale, Brautigan's story is both an act of expiation and a warning, one the gun enthusiasts and lobbyists have ignored for years. Since they are dead set on expanding the void, we are ever more dependent on Brautigan's flowers.


New Orleans Times-Picayune?
September 5, 1982



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