I recently pulled my copy of Richard Brautigan’s Trout Fishing in America up out of the basement for a reread.
The experience was sort of like a chance encounter with an old friend. You chitchat for a few minutes, catching up, and he tells you a few genuinely interesting things, things that maybe give you a different impression of who you thought he was, and then you both go on your way. Having read this book at different times since I discovered Brautigan in the early 70′s, it comes across as a different creature each time.
My first brush with Brautigan came when I was a high school kid on the lookout for weird stuff. I had managed to see some Stan Brackhage and Maya Deren films. I had Salvador Dali and Rene Magritte books. So when I ran across Richard Brautigan in a bookstore, he looked like the writer for me. At the time, I was impressed by the weirdness. It was an imaginative tour de force the likes of which I had not seen before. As much as it pains me to use the expression, I can only say that it “blew my mind.” Is it experimental? Avant-garde? Surrealistic? Dada-istic? Postmodern? Just plain weird? I don’t know. Although any of these labels might seem to fit to some extent, none of them fit comfortably. But when you’re dealing with something as highly original as this, who needs a label, anyway?
First, a comment on the writing. This is the first-written (but second-published) novel by a writer who had been establishing himself as a poet. And this is very much the work of a novelist who was thinking like a poet. In one anecdote, Brautigan talks about mowing an old woman’s lawn; a few weeks earlier, an itinerant looking for work had cut off three fingers using the lawnmower: “I was always careful with that lawnmower, knowing that the ghosts of three fingers were living it up in the grand spooky manner. They needed no company from my fingers. My fingers looked just great, right there on my hands.” At another point, we’re told that “The sun was like a huge fifty-cent piece that someone had poured kerosene on and then had lit with a match and said, ‘Here, hold this while I go get a newspaper,’ and put the coin in my hand, but never came back.”
It’s good to find out that someone looks at the world in that way.
Trout Fishing in America has no linear story of any sort. It’s a collection of vignettes, variations on the theme of Trout Fishing in America. Through the course of the book, we see the phrase used not only as the title, but also as an activity, the name of an entity who’s sort-of a character (the narrator exchanges several letters with someone identified as Trout Fishing in America), a disguise worn by a murderer (yes, he dresses as trout fishing in America), and (of course) a theme or metaphor that runs throughout.
In one chapter, Brautigan recalls an incident in which he and some of his friends in the sixth grade were on the playground at recess one day, and they started writing “Trout Fishing in America” in chalk on the backs of the first graders, much to the chagrin of the school administration and parents. In another chapter, the narrator goes to the Cleveland Wrecking Yard to check out a trout stream they’re selling in sections. One chapter is titled “The Autopsy of Trout Fishing in America.” And some of the chapters are simply reminiscences of camping in the great outdoors.
It’s easy to look at the book as a jumble of disjointed and meaningless ramblings set to the page by some heavily-drugged hippy type, but I think that if you spend the time it takes to read the book, you owe it to yourself to think about what you’ve just read. Brautigan is inviting us to take a look at how we relate to one another and to the world around us. For example, reading the Cleveland Wrecking Yard chapter leads one to the observation that there are plenty of businesses that would, were it possible, rip a trout stream out of its surroundings and sell sections of it from a warehouse. That we abuse our environment in various ways isn’t exactly an astounding or profound revelation, but it is a point that needs to be made over and over again. Here, we get it in a fairly imaginative and entertaining way.
Trout Fishing in America is a slim volume, easily readable in a single sitting if you have a Saturday afternoon to give it. But I would also say that after finishing the book, you would do well to go back and read it again sometime soon, while it’s still fresh in your mind.