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by Etelka Lehoczky?
When someone takes his own life, it's tempting to interpret everything he did and said near the end as a kind of warning. Such compulsive reductionism is particularly difficult to avoid in reading An Unfortunate Woman: A Journey, a book-length work Richard Brautigan completed a year before his suicide in 1984. In it, Brautigan creates what he calls "a calendar of one man's journey during a few months in his life" that, though labeled as fiction by its publisher, reads like memoir. The title refers to a friend who had killed herself and whose absence is the book's organizing force. Under the shadow of this event, Brautigan's familiar mix of wry stories and observations takes on a persistent mordancy. There are certainly moments here when he revels in the absurd, as when he relates his determination, while visiting Hawaii, to pose for a photo with a chicken. More often, though, he adopts a subdued tone that will surprise fans of his famously playful novels. After devoting so much thought to the question of individual freedom in a corrupt world, Brautigan seems here to concede, finally, that some things are inescapable. He dedicates his introduction to another friend who had recently died from cancer. It's possible to read countless other elements of the book as intimations of mortality, from Brautigan's compulsive traveling to his habit of concluding many sections with a date and the word "finished." But just as evident, though overshadowed by subsequent events, is the author's determination to resist the bleak certitude of death. "Life cannot be controlled and perhaps not even envisioned and ... design and portent are out of the question," he notes at one point. Such a statement — along with the rest of "An Unfortunate Woman" — can be read as an expression of Zen-like peace or of helplessness verging on despair.
The New York Times Book Review
July 16, 2000
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