Brautigan's Revenge

Richard Brautigan's latest work has just drifted in from out West and is now crashing at neighborhood bookstores. Revenge of the Lawn is a collection of 62 stories written between 1962 and 1970 that fit without the slightest crowding into a 174 page book. The pieces range in length from a few pages to several lines, tiny Brautiganisms that haven't made it into his poetry collections only because the words don't rhyme. Brautigan bills them as fiction but their accent gives them away as autobiographical trivia.

Brautigan's strength lies in his affectionate and ingenious trivialities. He takes the random actions of strangers and old girlfriends into his musings and they come out pleasant speculations and philosophical chuckles. One four-pager describes the narrator's spring fun-ins with two of his ex-girlfriends that end with anti-climactic cups of coffee. "They say in the spring a young man's fancy turns to thoughts of love," Brautigan concludes. "Perhaps if he has enough time left over, his fancy can even make room for a cup of coffee." For other stories he doesn't stop to comment but lets his subject give the punchline. In "A High Building In Singapore" the hero is walking down an unspecified San Francisco street watching his "mind functioning with the efficiency of a liquid pencil." He sees a "little girl who is really too small to be able to talk" but who's excitedly talking to her mother anyway. When he is close enough he finally overhears her say enthusiastically, "Yes, it was a high building in Singapore!"

In Brautigan's most charming vignettes echoes the talent of a far greater contemporary writer. His "High Building In Singapore" anecdote is so similar to incidents in Salinger that it seems like emotional plagiarism. In Buddy Glass's epic letter to his brother Zooey in Franny and Zooey he describes a similar encounter with a little girl who was standing at the lamb chop counter with her mother:

The little girl was about four, and, to pass the time, she leaned her back against the glass showcase and stared up at my unshaven face. I told her she was about the prettiest girl I'd seen all day. Which made sense to her; she nodded. I said I'd bet she had a lot of boyfriends. I got the same nod again. I asked her how many boy friends she had. She held up two fingers. "Two!" I said. "That's a lot of boyfriends. What are their names, sweetheart?" Said she, in a piercing voice, "Bobby and Dorothy." I grabbed my lamb chops and ran.

Richard Brautigan sounds continually like a low-key Buddy Glass oriented to Big Sur rather than New York City. The stories in this book could be entries into a hip, West Coast Buddy's journal. They both have that funny way of describing the commonplace, and they give casual gestures the liveliness of dialogue. The two narrators share the same fanciful tone and Brautigan can go far with his fancy.

Brautigan is at his best when he lets fancy take over completely. In "The Literary Life In California 1964" he describes a bookstore browser skeptically looking through one of his own books. After a few minutes of nervous indecision the man takes out a penny and tosses it. After looking at the coin the man puts back the book of poetry and walks out of the store looking very relaxed. "I walked over and found his reluctance lying there on the floor," Brautigan writes. "I put it in my pocket. I took it home with me and shaped it into this, having nothing better to do with my time." A character in another story, "Homage to the San Francisco YMCA," liked good verse. "One day he decided that his liking for poetry could not be fully expressed in just reading poetry or listening to poets reading on phonograph records. He decided to take the plumbing out of his house and completely replace it with poetry, and so he did." The poetry of John Donne replaced the pipes, Shakespeare the bathtub and Emily Dickinson the kitchen sink. The minor poets replaced the toilet. Then the lover of good verse ran into some trouble. When he went to the toilet the minor poets began gossiping about their careers. He decided that the poetry simply wouldn't do as plumbing but it refused to be replaced. The man got in a fight with the poetry but the poetry of Michael McClure and Vladimir Mayakovsky threw him down the stairs. Then he moved to the San Francisco "Y" where he now spends more time in the bathroom than anyone else.

As long as Brautigan stays light his talent for whimsy can carry him along. But when the jester feels it necessary to make a serious point his pretentiousness and predictability are unbearable. He stretches a tasteless metaphor about a 24-hour pig slaughter house into the five paragraph "A Complete History of Germany and Japan." In another piece Brautigan sits in a Times Square movie house next to a cliched man, "fat, about fifty years old, balding sort of and his face was completely minus any human sensitivity." Brautigan compares him to a dog in the cartoon. Not only is the allusion completely minus any human sensitivity but it's thin on originality.

Brautigan is incapable of successfully moving beyond his charm. He speaks with the same precise and creative tone as Buddy Glass but there is no backbone to these episodes. His lack of context limits him to musings that are Salinger's style but not his content. "A High Building In Singapore" remains just a funny remark overheard on a San Francisco street while Buddy's run-in with the little girl at the lamb chop counter has a significance to Salinger's fictional world that goes beyond the immediate narrative. One author has involved himself to capacity in the life of the very real Glass family while the other is a literary hobo who leaves town as quickly as he came.