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 Brautigan's Moth Balanced on an Apple by Lew Welch Those who'd read Richard Brautigan's Trout Fishing in America will be pleased to know that his new book, In Watermelon Sugar, is even better than that, and is even more beautiful. Nobody understands where Brautigan got his way of putting words together. I suppose you have to call it prose - there they are, little blocks of paragraphs that go from margin to margin on the page. And I suppose you have to call In Watermelon Sugar a novel - it has chapters and a plot, people fall in and out of love, and there is even gore and violence in it. But there is nothing like Richard Brautigan anywhere. Perhaps, when we are very old, people will write "Brautigans" just as we now write novels. Let us hope so. For this man has invented a genre, a whole new shot, a thing needed, delightful, and right. At the same time and this is very important, Brautigan's style, strange as it is, is as easy to read as the plainest prose of say, science fiction or detective stories. You start in, and within three pages you are trapped until the book ends. In Watermelon Sugar is mainly a landscape, a place of Mind, gentle, haunting, and beautiful. There is something called iDeath, a small village or living room or something, surrounded by the Forgotten Works, a sort of super-dump of Mind. Ordinary people wander about doing their deeds with a gentleness and grace as precarious as a "moth balancing on an apple." That last quote is from the book. But there is something very ominous about In Watermelon Sugar. It's as devastating as End Game for the same reasons, even though it gets there from an entirely different direction. In End Game Beckett arrives at his vision through images of unrelenting despair and ugliness. In Watermelon Sugar moves through images of relentless poignancy and beauty. It is almost too beautiful, too simple, tender and sweet. Like watermelon sugar itself. But he pulls it off, and drags us into a world of love and peace and simple reward. A place where we could eat, talk, make perfect love, with a minimum of bother to ourselves and to the world. What gets you in the gut is we're probably not good enough for that, it would drive us crazy, and besides the Forgotten Works are looming there, all around us, and it would be so easy. It would be so easy. And it won't happen. Except a few of us are doing it right now. And it never was. Except it went that way for those with the heart to do it. All through time. In every Place. It's the same old end game, but Richard chooses to go down with nothing less than the most beautiful girls, meals, daily deeds, and long night walks, looking at our total Loss. Yours and mine. If we let it. To get the point fully, you have to know how Richard is. Not who he is, that would be impossible to write. Even Richard may never be able to do that. Richard Brautigan is now 33 years old. In the days of the Beat Generation he was a precocious guy - 20 years old when everybody else was 29. He wrote a lot of poetry, fathered girls*, and tried to raise them. He succeeded. They are still alive and living somewhere else. He didn't dump them. They, and their mother, just went away. Every book of Richard's has a picture of a different and more beautiful chick on the ((Who are the Women on the Covers?|cover)). It's his trademark. The sign of a man who is often lonely, but seldom alone. One of the youngest members of the Beat Generation, he is one of the oldest members of the Hippie Thing - the Haight Ashbury side of it all. He is a Digger. One of the people who fed the mob on that now sad street. Many of his poems were free poems, poems printed by the Communications Co. and given away, free. On the street. This man is a real writer, an inventor of Form, Man of the street, and first-rate human being. (Richard Brautigan assures me he has fathered but one daughter. Ed.) San Francisco Chronicle Book Review December 15, 1968: This World 53, 59 Reprinted in Lew Welch: How I Work As a Poet & Other Essays. Bolinas, Grey Fox Press, 1983: 22-24.

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