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by Nancy Traub?
Hailed alternately as the last gasp of the Beat Generation and an honorary hippie, Richard Brautigan came to San Francisco in 1954, where he became famous as a novelist of the counter culture. He developed a cult following with books such as A Confederate General from Big Sur, 1964, Trout Fishing in America, 1967, and In Watermelon Sugar, 1968.
His latest novel, So the Wind Won't Blow It All Away, is a departure from these earlier efforts. Influenced by Zen, via the Beats, his early novels emphasized spontaneity and immediate experience. Brautigan is still concerned with imagination, freedom, and the connections between past and present, but the new novel is also nostalgic.
Brautigan mourns "a small group of people whose way of life was already doomed, even as they lived it." He wants to write it down before it becomes American dust, blown away by the wind.
The narrator remembers his past as a 12-year-old boy in a small town two years after the end of World War II. He leads an isolated life, watching children's funerals and befriending old people. He keeps returning to two themes — the accidental shooting of another young boy and an eccentric couple who come to fish at a pond every evening with all their living room furniture.
Brautigan's own imagination is a potent force. Although he structures this novel more conventionally than his previous ones, Brautigan still follows his unique patterns of thought that gives his writing its wit and orginality.
A seemingly dry description is subtly wry: "The afternoon sun was appropriately low in the sky and the wind was beginning to die down and there was a feeling of evening approaching with its refreshing contents and renewed hope after a long hot summer afternoon."
Brautigan's deceptively simple style and matter-of-fact tone keep tragic events from becoming melodramatic.
"David pedaled up to the filling station on his bicycle. He had a .22 across the handlebars. Again: it was not an unusual sight back in those days just after the War for kids to casually carry guns with them."
One fateful day the boy decides to spend his money on bullets instead of a hamburger and, "For the rest of my life I'll think about that hamburger. I'll be sitting there at the counter, holding it in my hands with tears streaming down my cheeks. The waitress will be looking away because she doesn't like to see kids crying when they are eating hamburgers and also she doesn't want to embarrass me."
It's as if the narrator is compelled to tell this story, to understand his part in it. "I am still searching for some meaning in it and perhaps even a partial answser to my own life, which as I grow closer and closer to death, the answer gets further and further away."
The reader brings his or her own meaning to the story; we benefit from Brautigan's search.
Oakland Tribune?
April 1, 1984, The Tribune Calendar: 7.
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 birgit at cybernetic-meadows.net.
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