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 John Ditsky
Richard Brautigan's fiction shares many of the qualities of his poetry — charm, brevity, whimsy, and in many cases a total inability to leave a residue in the consciousness. His narrative voice, in its matter-of-factness, resembles that of that other Californian, Steinbeck?, but lacks the older writer's coherent philosophy and sense of apparent purpose. Yet even in these respects Brautigan's writing seems consistent with that of the more intellectual practitioners of experiment fiction, such as Coover?, Gass, Barthelme, and Barth. Moreover, Brautigan writes stories and chapter units of minimal length, like those of W.S. Merwin? and Leonard Michaels?. In addition, he is accessible on a level just a cut above sentimentality and mass-art: obviously beyond Rod McKuen, but perhaps on a par with Kurt Vonnegut?.
Brautigan's Revenge of the Lawn is a collection of "stories" written over an eight-year period, and is similar in tone to Confederate General from Big Sur, In Watermelon Sugar and his best known work, Trout Fishing in America. If it lacks the slackness of The Abortion, its predecessor in publication, it shares with it an only temporarily disarming casualness about the motivation for the creative act. One piece begins, "There's only one way to get into it," and another toys with its initial statement of subject matter: "Well, let's see what can happen with that. It might be interesting." A fiction like "Thoreau Rubber Band" ultimately depends upon an endpoint fusion of levels of seriousness for effect, like poems written for public readings. Single images control whole narratives; here in its entirety is "Lint?":
I'm haunted a little this evening by feelings that have no vocabulary and events that should be explained in dimensions of lint rather than words.
I've been examining half-scraps of my childhood. They are pieces of distant life that have no form or meaning. They are things that just happen like lint.
I've been examining half-scraps of my childhood. They are pieces of distant life that have no form or meaning. They are things that just happen like lint.
Autobiographical fragments, often achieving easy effects, even flirt with the maudlin, as in "One Afternoon in 1939?," where Brautigan repeats a daughter's favorite story about her father as a child. A little charm goes a long way, and Brautigan has the good sense to keep his pieces short, as much out of prudence as out of art. Wit is the soul of his brevity, time-killing his morality, and the experience of others a kind of clay: "I put it in my pocket. I took it home with me and shaped it into this, having nothing better to do with my time." Even in the more successful stories, like the tightly-constructed "The World War I Los Angeles Airplane?," where the experience of recounting a failed man's life collides with the facts of his death and the necessity of informing his daughter, we are given a clue to Brautigan's suspicions of conventional fiction: "Always at the end of the words somebody is dead."
Georgia Review 26
Fall 1972: 297-313
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}