Click on the covers for more information on the various editions, including their availability. If you cannot view the image, download the most recent version of Flash Player Pink and Fading in Watermelon Ink by Mason Smith? One way of receiving Richard Brautigan's new book is disarmingly suggested by the novel itself: there ought to be somebody in clothes of welcome on duty all the time to accept and register everything that anybody wants or has to write. Log it in, describe it briefly, let the author put it on the shelf of his choice, on no account catalog it, and give the relieved creator coffee and a cookie. Human rights for books! The setting is a library devoted to the reception of manuscripts, an all-night depository for one-way communications, and the librarian who narrates the story has just accepted, among the day's 24 assorted acquisitions, another book by Richard Brautigan - looking "a little older, a little more tired" than when he brought in his first. "What's this one about?" the librarian asks. Brautigan's casual answer "Just another book." That could be a very arch understatement, coming from the wise and funny man who wrote Trout Fishing in America. Of an order apart from most books, Trout Fishing in America was a totally original novel plotted in the changing shapes of a heart-breaking symbol for what is happening to America. "Trout Fishing in America" was a legless wino, a cheap hotel, a revolutionary slogan chalked on the backs of schoolchildren; it was the political disguise of the murderous "Mayor of the Twentieth Century?"; It was a brooding spirit that remembered "people with three-cornered hats fishing in the dawn" and Lewis and Clark discovering the Great Falls of the Missouri. It was dead, extinct as the dinosaur (trout had become steel, streams had become stores), but it seemed to live, transformed again, in the life and prose and person of Brautigan himself. Every chapter had a secret hook to set, a steel meaning in a sparely-tied fly of anecdote and metaphor, a valuable and accurate surprise. Just another book like that is what you pray for every time you crack a new one. The fact is we are still getting Brautigan writings from a time before Trout Fishing made the world his oyster. The new book has been around a while and owes more to In Watermelon Sugar, which itself was written a couple of years or more before Trout Fishing was published. The commonplace short dialogues of greeting, eating and bedding - "Conversations and things that happen every day. (Work, baths, breakfast and dinner)" - that gave In Watermelon Sugar so many relaxed, seemingly vacuous pages illustrated the novel's point about peaceful coexistence with mortality. They also suggested analogously that with regard to literary mortality the way to sanity was "watermelon ink" - which one imagines to be vaguely pink and fading while one reads. The new book is written almost entirely with the sugar-water sprezzatura of an artist who hands it in to a dead-end library and never expects to see it again. The story is simple and straightforward. Two people help each other out of temporary blockages; an abortion, ironically, the agency of their delivery. This librarian is a nice confident human, but he has not faced the state of things outside the library for three years. The girl, Vida, comes into his library and his life with the problem that she hates her own voluptuous body: the leerings and pawings of the ubiquitous American mammaphile have made her wish she were a pipestem. Presumably thanks to the same gift which makes him the perfect book-greeter, the librarian immediately puts Vida at ease, even though he's as mad about her outsize breasts as anybody. They bed down very agreeably, the only resistance coming from hooks and buttons. "It was a difficult pile of clothes. Each garment was won in a strange war." The result is pregnancy, and that leads without soul-searching to a decision for Mexico and the mill of Dr. Garcia. Here the book moves out of the whimsically imagined San Francisco library into the present California freeway and airport scene, and addresses, in an oddly frontal way, the Women's Lib themes of abortion and sex-objectification. It will be read in part as a rather uncomradely attack on Brautigan's fellow girl-watchers, and perhaps as some sort of statement about the nastiness and dishonesty of our social and legal pressures around the subject of abortion. But it's doubtful if the author of Trout Fishing - who did his damning there in the permanent and hard, artistic war - has his heart in such a lazy undertaking. There is something spooky and funny here, pale pink and fading. A jolly friend named Foster is the foster-parent of the abortion. The trip to Tijuana is mostly a demeaning comedy of the confusion Vida's body wreaks among the males. Just before the little party leaves for the plane South, an old lady (unborn?) comes to the library and demands to know what they have done with her (unborn?) mother. She has a book to deposit, but its pages are "blank like snow." What begins to ring true underneath the scorn piled on the American male, which is neither true, serious or interesting, is a steady, step-by-step notation of a real trip and a real abortion. These parents of a prevented child are spooked numb by what they are doing. They go through with it by putting one foot before the other, and the librarian tells it all, straight. It will be the last thing you expected from Richard Brautigan, but you will know pretty well how it feels to go to Mexico on such an errand. After it is over, you will say with Vida, "You're looking at the future biggest fan The Pill ever had." The Abortion is short, swift and formally neat, and though it contains some very offhand writing, this experiment along the limits of the watermelon thinness of Brautigan's ink is cheeky enough, and there are enough indelible stretches where the watermelon ink rinses out some India, to be just a little more than just another book. The New York Times Book Review March 28, 1971: 4, 26 Reprinted in Contemporary Literary Criticism. Vol. 12. Ed. Dedria Bryfonski. Detroit: Gale Research Company, 1980. 57-74.

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