Click on the covers for more information on the different editions, including their availability. If you cannot view the image, download the most recent version of Flash Player The Dream and the Pen by Tony Tanner Tony Tanner welcomes "one of the most original and attractive novels to have come out of America during the last decade", the work of a West Coast writer who has constructed an exhilarating experience out of America's present taste for self-destruction. American literature has a great tradition of realism, of a fiction which finds out the facts of the matter, or what is the matter with the facts. But increasingly American writers are using the liberations of fantasy to counteract the constrictions of the contemporary environment. No one does this with more economy and delicacy than Richard Brautigan. He seems at first like a very local (San Franciscan) writer, but the implications of his work cover the whole of America, and his appeal should be instantly felt in England. Trout Fishing in America, which is both very funny and very poignant, seems to me to be one of the most original and attractive novels to have come out of America during the last decade. If there is any narrative line in the book it concerns indeed the author's various attempts to find good trout fishing: but Trout Fishing in America becomes a person, a place, a hotel, a cripple, a pen nib, and of course a book. Protean and amorphous, it is a dream to be pursued, a sense of something lost, a quality of life, a spirit that is present or absent in many forms. Because Brautigan exercises complete freedom with words he can sit Trout Fishing in America down with Maria Callas for a meal, produce a letter from him/it saying that he is leaving for Alaska, or start a chapter "This is the autopsy of Trout Fishing in America" - and leave us concluding that the book is an autopsy of the whole American dream. Certainly the book is full of death. There are endless references to graveyards, mortuaries, cemeteries, wreaths, memorials, omens of the decline and passing of things. The feeling of fertility gone sour, of a once beautiful land given over to deadness, hangs over the book. Specific references to criminals like John Dillinger and "Pretty Boy" Floyd? add to the sense of the destructive violence which has entered into America's heritage. The narrator's quest for good Trout Fishing in America is a series of disappointments. It brings him finally to the Cleveland Wrecking Yard, another version of that terminal dump of waste and used things which for so many American writers seems to loom up as a possible end to the American Dream. In the Yard a trout stream is being sold by the foot, stacked up in a room containing piles of toilets and dusty lumber. The touch of surrealism only deepens the muted sense of something precious lost. One could call Brautigan's book an idyll, a satire, a quest, an exercise in nostalgia, a lament for America, or a joke, but it is a book which floats effortlessly free of all categories, and it is just this experience of floating free which is communicated while one is reading it. There is certainly a feeling for a pastoral America which has vanished or has been despoiled by mechanization, crime, accumulating garbage, and various kinds of poison and violence. But the book is nothing like a polemic, and Brautigan, it is clear, would not engage in anything so recognizable as an established genre. The list of contents, the chapter divisions, the "characters", the narrative episodes, all mock the forms of conventional fiction by pretending to add up to a recognizable structure which is not there when you come to look for it. Among other things the book is a typographical playfield. [Parts of the photocopy are blurry - any help to fill in the gaps would be much appreciated] Clearly all this might add up to a recipe for whimsy and a style with such a light touch it cannot always avoid coyness, false naïveté and sentimentality. These can all be found in Brautigan's work, but not in this novel. The evanescent quality of the ... elusive metamorphosis of sense and form (like clouds over the Pacific), nevertheless leave one in possession of ... extremely haunting, evocative and capable of making subtle solicitations to a whole range of authentic feeling. Towards the end of the book the narrator dreams of a modern American Leonardo da Vinci who invents a new "lure" for trout fishing in America: it will take a great artist to entice back that idea, ideal or dream. ... the narrator is given a golden nib with the following admonitions: ""Write with this, but don't write hard because this pen has got a gold nib, and a gold nib is very impressionable. After a while it takes on the personality of the writer. Nobody else can write with it. This pen becomes just like a person's shadow. It's the only pen to have. But be careful." To which the narrator adds: I thought to myself what a lovely nib trout fishing in America would make with a stroke of cool green trees along the river's shore, wild flowers and dark fins pressed against the paper. The dream will enter the writer's pen, with the characteristic instruction to write simply and individually, avoid other people's versions, and not leaning too heavily on his own. While Trout Fishing in America is foundering in the Cleveland Wrecking Yard, it is still flourishing in the writer's imagination. It is perhaps one of the most pervasive themes of contemporary American fiction that these two realms - Wrecking Yard and the imagination - are in a permanent struggle for possession of "America", but I doubt if any writer has posed the opposition so delicately as Brautigan. In Watermelon Sugar The opposition appears again in In Watermelon Sugar. The narrator lives in a happy commune called, mysteriously, iDEATH. The prevailing material there is watermelon sugar, which may be food, furniture, fuel, or more generally the sweet secretion of the imagination. There has been a defection from iDEATH by a drunken foul-mouthed figure called inBOIL. He and his gang have gone back to live in an ugly place called the Forgotten Works. This is the ultimate Wrecking Yard, the realm of dead trash which the imagination insists on leaving behind. There is a confrontation between inBOIL's gang and the happy commune which leaves the latter finally undisturbed and well rid of the death-obsessed, trash-minded defectors. In Watermelon Sugar is a charming and original work, perhaps a little too obvious in its parabolic form though the parable itself is extremely relevant. The main thing is to welcome the appearance of a refreshingly new, unhysterical, unegotistical, often magical American writer. In Trout Fishing in America Richard Brautigan has already added a minor classic to American literature. The Times July 25, 1970: 5G

Copyright note: My purpose in putting this material on the web is to provide Brautigan scholars and fans with ideas for further research into Richard Brautigan's work. It is used here in accordance with fair use guidelines. No attempt is made regarding commercial duplication and/or dissemination. If you are the author of this article or hold the copyright and would like me to remove your article from the Brautigan Archives, please contact me at .

---