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Ann Ronald's review of 'So the Wind Won't Blow It All Away'
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Review of So the Wind Won't Blow It All Away

by Ann Ronald
University of Nevada, Reno

As soon as I start to translate a Richard Brautigan novel into everyday prose, its words dissolve. When I try to pin down his imagery, "so the wind won't blow it all away" it eludes me, "dust ... American ... dust." Like the fabled trout of his best-known work, sliding upstream just out of an angler's eager cast, the language of So the Wind Won't Blow It All Away floats transparently between Brautigan's imagination and mine.

Brautigan's narrator describes his task in an apparently straightforward manner. "As I sit here on August 1st, 1979," he explains, "my ear is pressed up against the past as if to the wall of a house that no longer exists." His goal is to invade that house of the imagination, to recreate the summer of 1947 when he was twelve years old and "the days of my childhood were running out, and every step I took was a step that brought me nearer to that February 17th 1948, orchard where my childhood would fall apart just like some old Roman ruins of a childhood." Carefully, then, "like peeling an onion into a smaller and smaller circle with tears growing in my eyes until the onion is no more, all peeled away and I stop crying," Brautigan's narrator unwinds his tragic past.

First his layered prose introduces an entire population of young and old eccentrics. The narrator becomes, in turn, the little boy who rises at dawn to watch early morning rituals at a funeral parlor next door, the grade-schooler who loses two playmates to death, and the twelve-year-old who is fascinated by hamburgers and guns. His companions, equally grotesque, range from the night watchman at a nearby sawmill, with his "thin beer-brittle physique," to an old man who carves docks and, when eating, dashes "stew down his beard like lava coming from a volcano." My favorites, though, are the middle-aged couple who fish an isolated pond. From their truck they unload a couch, stuffed chair, rocking chair, end tables, and floor lamps, setting up every night an entire living room out-of-doors. The boy is fascinated by the display; such pseudo-domesticity, in fact, is the closest thing to home in the entire novel.

Most of the time the boy wanders alone from encounter to encounter, seeking some friends and avoiding others, luring the reader into a nostalgic yet nightmarish past. "I can hear the sound of redwing blackbirds and the wind blowing hard against the cattails," the narrator recalls. "They rustle in the wind like ghost swords in battle and there is the steady lapping of the pond at the shore's edge, which I belong to with my imagination." My imagination meets the narrator, his boyhood self, and the 1940s' grotesques like the middle-aged fishermen at the shore's edge too. There I try to reconstruct Brautigan's world without making the implicit so explicit that the tragi-comic evocation is destroyed.

So I choose not to explain the February day in 1948 when a childhood disintegrated. To learn about that event, "so the wind won't blow it all away," the reader must approach the rainswept apple orchard on his own. Suffice it to say that all our laughter turns to tears when baseball, Mom, apple pie, and Miss American Pie disappear into the American Gothic of Richard Brautigan's mind.


Western American Literature? 18.2
Summer 1983: 164-165



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