Word: brautiganisms
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REVENGE OF THE LAWN by Richard Brautigan. 174 pages. Simon & Schuster...
...readers who do not want to face up to real life. But as Playwright Tom Stoppard noted in his existential comedy Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead, an exit is always an entrance some place else. One of the most original, whimsical escape artists in contemporary American writing is Richard Brautigan, who is definitely some place else...
Revenge of the Lawn, Brautigan explains, contains two chapters that were meant for Trout Fishing but somehow got misplaced just before the book was published. The first is "Rembrandt Creek," which "looked like a painting hanging in the world's largest museum with a roof that went to the stars and galleries that knew the whisk of comets." The second, "Carthage Sink," is about "a Goddamn bombastic river" that suddenly dried up in mid-boast...
...unlikely that readers of Trout Fishing noticed their absence. The two chapters are just as much at home in this collection of 62 stories as they would have been in their intended novel. In fact, it is not even necessary to separate Brautigan's prose into short stories or novels. All of his images, longings and humor eventually float free of their structural moorings and are kept aloft by the only thing in Brautigan that really counts-his special voice...
...Friends also contains a marvelous essay on undergraduate poetry ("Go Away Richard Brautigan, You're Not Helping College Poetry Any"), in which Rosen asks that "we should appreciate and encourage the struggle that goes on by thinking of the poem not as a flawless finale, but as a stopping point on the way to perfection. The poem is the point at which our strength gave out." His essays themselves are best read in the same light. Each talks to its neighbor, reveals its genesis and goals, sometimes even addresses its reader. As a collection, rarely do they presume to speak...