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by Digby Durrant?
Brautigan's latest novel, in its familiar laconic fashion, sounds its usual plangent note of nostalgia for the loss of American innocence. From the first artful page you know the forty-four-year-old man did something appalling in 1944 when he was twelve; only in the last few pages do you discover that he had accidentally killed his only friend, David, by taking a careless shot at a stray pheasant. The Court absolves him; the community does not. He and his mother are obliged to move. He reflects miserably that if he'd bought a hamburger instead of bullets his friend would still be alive. He becomes obsessed with hamburgers, reading everything about them he can lay his hands on. He even fakes an interview with a Mexican cook on the subject. Only when he finally destroys all his notes does the healing process begin.
Nicknamed Whitey because of his albino hair, he'd always been a loner, mooning around the ponds and sawmills of the dreary town in Oregon where he lived on Welfare with his mother, usually between stepfathers. At five he liked to get up early and in his pyjamas stand on a chair watching hearses being loaded; he particularly liked to see the coffins of other children. He seeks the company of spooky older people: the alcoholic who watches over a sawmill and whose empty beer bottles he wheels away in a baby buggy to sell; the old lady who can't forget her husband who died thirty years before and whose face she can't remember; the old man who lives in a shack made of packing crates and whose beautiful hand-carved pier disguises a complete distaste for fishing. But above all what captures his imagination is the fat, middle-aged couple who arrive at the pond every evening at seven bringing a large couch, lamps, chairs, sidetables, wood stove and framed photographs. They arrange their outdoor living-room carefully, settle themselves in it, cook and fish. Once they say hallo to the kid dangling his own desultory line, drowning worms rather than catching fish.
Thirty-two years later Whitey sees this mysterious couple as brave and eccentric, choosing to pursue their own fantasies rather than conform to the plastic values of a TV society. He would like back the America that encouraged people like this to flourish. Where has it gone? But how much more innocent, too, was that America, caustically observed by Dickens? and Trollope, whose dark underside was always more influential than the simple outdoor society so dear to Whitman and Melville. Brautigan's sentimental elegy makes no such inquiries.
London Magazine
June 1983: 102-103
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