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by Lorna Sage?

This is a parody travel book — the whole point about Richard Brautigan being that in most important senses he hasn't moved at all since Trout Fishing in America in the 1960s. As a student of space, he's terrific on time, an expert in the art of sitting still, and this collection of pieces is a loving, if slightly dismayed tribute to the places he has sat in over the past 10 years or so.

There are some stories, and a few tricky autobiographical anecdotes. He bows ceremoniously to his Japanese wife ("the smell of her perfume made it possible for me not to smell the dead mouse in my heart any more"); he feeds 18 dishevelled chickens somewhere in Montana down the road from the Tastee-Freez; he reads about Groucho Marx on a trip to Tokyo ("Sayonara, Groucho"); he sternly refuses to be sentimental in San Francisco ("This is a tourist town and people come here to look at French bread"). However, as these glimpses of his world may suggest, he's really interested only in the most oblique and fugitive conjunctions of things. The two-page dialogue between, say, a bucket of small, live eels and a pan of spaghetti in a Japanese kitchen — that's his style.

Absences, gaps in reality and disappearances are guaranteed to stop him in his tracks. One sinister, confessional tale "How could I do it?" features a jigsaw puzzle and a vacuum cleaner ("There was just too much blue sky"). Others savour the sensation of encountering an empty mailbox, a funeral parlour with all the lights out, an erotic movie of which, by some inverted miracle, he contrives to miss the end. "So there you have it: everything is here except that which is missing." How close the connection is, I wouldn't like to say, but he's a connoisseur of hangovers, sometimes nailing them with a stunning phrase "Soaking wet monkeys were at play in my mind" sometimes producing one of his rare purple passages, as in this description of "Hangover as Folk Art":


Time has told, a little. Old men stopping him in the street with handbills for massage parlours remind him, sadly, of himself. "Sometimes when I finish writing something, perhaps even this ..." And in this vein his mock-naive manner gets uncomfortably close to the real thing: "I feel very dull like a rusty knife in the kitchen of weed-dominated monastery that was abandoned because everybody was too bored to say their prayers anymore ..."

Not that he does it badly, but for me he's most serious as a comic. The gag is the nearest analogue to his elegant two-page conceits. It's tempting, given the Japanese connection, to suppose he's learnt a thing or two from haiku too, but no. He doesn't put down roots in any culture that way, he travels light; in his time capsule.

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The Observer
April 19, 1981: 32.




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