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 Hair Brained by J.G. Farrell? To older generations one of the more baffling aspects of the hippie protest movement is its cult to simplicity. The hard-line hippie has no time for all the laborious qualifications that older folk might want to append to words like 'peace' and 'love'. This in turn leaves the old folk wondering whether the hippie might not have more hair than brains. Richard Brautigan has a good deal of hair (to judge from his photograph), no shortage of brains and an artful simplicity of manner that occasionally recalls Robert Frost, though blended with surreal fantasy. The less successful of these two works is In Watermelon Sugar, a fairy story about a town called iDEATH built of watermelon sugar but normal in most other respects and recounting a triangular love affair which ends with a suicide. The simplicity with which it is written conveys a certain grace, but the author's sense of humor is absent and in most respects it is inferior to Boris Vian's masterpiece L'Ecume des Jours which it in some ways resembles. The best of Trout Fishing in America, however, is very good indeed. Consider, for example, this description of schoolboys called in to the headmaster's office to answer for their misdeeds: 'We reluctantly stamped into the principal's office, fidgeting and pawing our feet and one of us suddenly got an insane blink going and putting our hands into our pockets and looking away and then back again and looking up at the light fixture on the ceiling, how much it looked like a boiled potato, and down again and at the picture of the principal's mother on the wall. She had been a star in the silent pictures and was tied to a railroad track.' This occurs in an anecdote whose charm and polish would not have been out of place in the New Yorker. The most obvious feature of Trout Fishing in America, however, is a soft-spoken anarchy that becomes more powerful as the book proceeds, using trout fishing as a false theme that has less and less relation to anything one might expect from the title. This idea contains a fund of energy but brings with it the danger of whimsy, which Mr. Brautigan has not always managed to avoid. His writing, when he has his imagination under control, however, is frequently splendid and his imagery so supple as to make more conventional writers look hopelessly musclebound. Spectator August 8, 1970: 488 Note: The above is an excerpt from a longer article which includes reviews of The Book of Giuliano Sansevero by Andrea Giovene, The Age of Death by William Leonard Marshall, An Estate of Memory by Ilona Karmel, and Trout Fishing in America and In Watermelon Sugar by Richard Brautigan.

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