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by Patricia Morley?
Richard Brautigan's prose is pure Theater of the Absurd, without the theater. He provides stage. props and play. This short novel is a hard-nosed look at America seen through a kaleidoscope. The mood is bittersweet, its humor whimsical-to-black.
The novel's narrative is simple, even simplistic. A 47-year-old man is looking back at his childhood from five to 15 in the 1940s, and at the strange assortment of crazies who peopled his young life. At five, he stood on a chair to watch early morning funerals at the funeral parlor next door. At 12, he accidentally shoots an older boy, a tragedy which ends his childhood and scars his life. Why, he has asked himself ever since, didn't he buy a hamburger instead of a package of bullets? He had money for one or the other. The plot becomes an image of a nation that has also made some unfortunate choices and been correspondingly scarred.
None of the secondary characters is three-dimensional. They exist half-in, half-out of the narrator's imagination: colorful and bizarre, they are surreal but not synthetic. Their originality has not yet been destroyed by advertising and TV.
The title, and cover photo, are taken from the boy's favorite characters, a grossly fat couple who come nightly to set up their entire living room beside a pond in order to fish and picnic in comfort: "it looked like a fairy tale functioning happily in the post-World War II gothic of America before television crippled the imagination of America and turned people indoors and away from living out their own fantasies with dignity."
The title, followed by "Dust ... American ... Dust," becomes a refrain. Like the plot, a tale of misdirected violence, it symbolizes the nation. The elegy is a lament for a small-town world where individuals mattered.
Brautigan's fiction blends meticulous exactitude with free-ranging imagination. The images are zany but right, sometimes memorable. Lyricism, humor, and a playful profundity work well together in Brautigan's 20th book.
Birmingham News?
September 26, 1982: 6E
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