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by Amy Lippman?
Richard Brautigan's lastest work is a thin piece of labored eccentricity.
Brautigan, who promised us a fresh voice and exciting narrative style in his 1967 novel, Trout Fishing in America, has been unsuccessful in fulfilling the standard of quality and orginality he established in that exceptional first work.
Trout Fishing wove distinctive, poetic fragments of experience and dream into a rich tapestry of fiction. But the rhetoric of allusion and metaphor that abounds in So The Wind Won't Blow It All Away ultimately fails to come together as a polished novel.
This is the story of a 12-year-old's experiences in small-town post-World War II America, when a young boy's days were occupied with little more than fishing and collecting beer bottles for deposit from the alcoholic on the edge of the lake.
Brautigan recounts the tale as a 47-year-old man looking back on the event that surrounded a fatal accident of his boyhood.
The narrative awkwardly stumbles from past to present and back again. Ineffectively organizing the story's chronology, it serves only to tangle and detract. Where this retrospective approach might have offered insight and depth to an understanding — both ours and the narrator's — of the boy's personality, it serves no purpose here.
Brautigan is at his best when his thoughts and prose detour from the novel's weak and incidental plot, exploring instead the peculiarities that engage his characters: his mother's fear of gas stoves, the boy's obssession with death, the family that brings an entire living rooom to the shore of the lake in order to fish from the sofa.
When recounting these details, Brautigan's voice is that of his young protagonist, and we can credit any narrative irrationality to the inconsistency of childish observation.
But the author feels obliged to tie these delicate wanderings to events which have no bearing, and, consequently, they remain contrivances.
Brautigan intends So The Wind Won't Blow It All Away to be an American Tragedy, but the novel is too inconsequential to make his design for it little more than a silly pretension.
What is more disappointing is that Brautigan has demonstrated before, in the earliest of his nine novels, that he is indeed a fine writer. His observations can be sharp and amusing; his prose profound; his metaphors dazzling.
In his more recent efforts, however, thematic ambition has exceeded the structural limitations of style, and So The Wind Won't Blow It All Away proves no exception.
Brautigan's many enthusiasts will surely be disappointed for it would seem that this author's technique has been lying out by the fish pond for too long and has begun to rust.
San Francisco Chronicle?
September 2, 1982: 55.
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