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by Herbert Mitgang
What Richard Brautigan is trying to say is not exactly spelled out in the titles of his books: Trout Fishing in America, A Confederate General From Big Sur, or, his latest, The Tokyo-Montana Express, published by Seymour Lawrence/Delacorte Press this week. Could the author of that title be kidding?
Speaking on the telephone from his small ranch near Livingston, Montana (pop. 7,000), some 40 miles north of Yellowstone National Park, Mr. Brautigan made it all reasonably clear.
"I live in Montana and I'm frequently in Tokyo and in San Francisco. One day I'm here, the next day I'm there. The novel is arranged like a train trip. There are stops along the way, and the 'I' in the story is the voice of the stations along the tracks of the Tokyo-Montana Express. Each chapter is separated by a photo of a medallion of the last coal-burning train that I saw in the transportation museum in Tokyo. I get a lot of my work done at the ranch. There's isolation here, a beautiful relationship to the fierce, stark, hugeness of the land. And I find a kinship between Montana and Japan; the people are dynamic in both places."
What about those offbeat titles? Mr. Brautigan said he invents them because they're interesting to him, which is reason enough if your novels attract an underground audience.
"I started out writing poetry for eight years. I felt that until I could write a sentence, I couldn't write a novel. Then I began writing novels. Trout Fishing went through 15 drafts, and this novel took three years. I write quickly, but think about things for about 20 years. Now, at 45, I feel that I'm maturing and weathering. The weather is very nice in Montana."
The New York Times Book Review
October 26, 1980
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