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by Robert Daily?
This novel The Tokyo-Montana Express has nothing to do with trains. Nor is it really a novel. Richard Brautigan has gathered 131 very brief sketches — "one-frame movies" he calls them — of people in Japan and the American West, "some confident, others still searching for their identities." Their stories are curiously similar. Many are retired hippies and occasional philosophers, and all lead kooky lives; they chase lost snowflakes, feed cantaloupe to cats, teach chickadees to tap dance, and photograph abandoned Christmas trees.
Sadly, Brautigan's long-awaited ninth "novel" is as craggy and uneven as the Montana landscapes he evokes. Some of the scenes he paints are compelling and hauntingly unforgettable, but many are painfully dull, they seem crude and unfinished, like hurried practice exercises. His language is generally swift, lean, and precise, but sometimes he slips into the sloppy style and vapidity of a college freshman ("the people are very nice" serves as description in one sketch). If only Brautigan had discarded the less-promising vignettes and taken more care in developing the others.
Saturday Review
October 1980: 87
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