So the Wind Won't Blow It All Away

Richard Brautigan So the Wind Won't Blow It All Away (1982)
This was Brautigan's final novel, one which supposedly foreshadows his suicide in 1984 - which I don't quite buy. So the Wind Won't Blow It All Away is told from the perspective of a twelve-year old boy who accidentally shoots his only friend and spends the rest of his life regretting that he didn't spend what little money he had on a hamburger rather than bullets on that unfortunate day. If not without humour, it's nevertheless a solemn, introspective novel lamenting the advent of a world which no longer makes so much sense as it once did, and while the author did indeed shoot himself in the head, two whole years had passed and you could pick almost anything from Brautigan's body of work as a foreshadowing of his demise.

Of those I've read, of all Brautigan's novels this one does seem a little more specific in its focus, less-meandering than he can be; and it's a sombre read with its doubtless autobiographical focus on extremes of poverty and the impermanence of existence, hence - I suppose - the somewhat tenuous suggestion that it could count for a suicide note. Whatever the case may have been, it's an astonishing and powerful piece of writing which once again raises the question of how Brautigan, whose voice is nothing if not distinctive to the point of being absolutely his own, managed to keep from repeating himself or writing the same novel over and over. I suspect had he been writing a couple of decades earlier, his posthumous reputation would have been colossal by this point.

Revenge of the Lawn

Richard Brautigan Revenge of the Lawn (1971)
This is an odd one, a collection of Brautigan's short stories, except as with the two or three page chapters which constitute most of his novels, they're so short as to amount to what may as well be considered poetry in prose form - pithy thumbnail snapshots of Brautigan's daily existence in San Franciso but, in this case, without any particular overarching narrative theme beyond having come from the same guy. Some of them are wonderful and none of them are of a length conducive to outstaying their welcome, but the whole never quite adds up to the sort of thing you find with the novels. Occasionally there's something great and yet so brief it can be quoted in full right here, The Scarlatti Tilt, for example.

'It's very hard to live in a studio apartment in San Jose with a man who's learning to play the violin.' That's what she told the police when she handed them the empty revolver.

Mostly, it's a satisfying collection peppered with the usual astonishing morsels of deceptively simple profundity which cement the legend of Brautigan as never having quite slotted into any literary tradition excepting perhaps his own.

Genesis 0

Isabelle Nicou Genesis 0 (2007)
Back in March, I opined that Nicou's Paresis wasn't likely to be Amphetamine Sulphate's chart smashing hit single for all that it constitutes an astonishing debut. Genesis 0, on the other hand - Nicou's second novel to be translated from the French - may be another thing entirely. It demonstrates the same forensic level of attention to existential and biological detail - so beautifully realised that it almost hurts - and yet its purpose is driven and absolutely clear, and to the point of reminding me - because apparently I'd forgotten - that this was what proper novels used to look like before everything expanded to five-hundred page bloaters with the author's name in raised silver type. This is the sort of thing Penguin should be publishing now rather than whatever the fuck it is they actually do publish these days.

Genesis 0 - and that's zero rather than the fifteenth letter of the alphabet - inhabits pregnancy and in doing so explores territory I only seem able to recall having encountered in Saturday Night and Sunday Morning and, to a much lesser extent, The Abortion by Richard Brautigan. Given where we all came from, without exception, this seems a ridiculous oversight on the part of world literature, so possibly it's just me. Obviously, I've never found myself with child, but I'm particularly close to someone who has, so a lot of Genesis 0 seems painfully familiar in its documentation of the fundamental changes to one's existence which occur when the periods shut down; and it's nice to find the subject approached without any of the customarily sappy shite about ribbons.

I don't know if we're still bothering to use the term transgressive fiction here, but if so, Genesis 0 proves it to be a redundant label risen above the waves only because the alleged mainstream of literature has devolved so far from doing what it should do. It's by no means an easy read and it demands that you pay attention, but masterpiece honestly doesn't seem too great an accolade.

The Hawkline Monster

 

Richard Brautigan The Hawkline Monster (1974)
This was the first Brautigan I ever read, mainly because Reuben - with whom I was sharing a house at the time - shoved it at me and said, you must read this because it's amazing. This would have been 1984, possibly the first half of '85, and while I did indeed think it was amazing, it has somehow taken me thirty-five years to follow up on its promise with others by the guy; but I think I now understand why.

The Hawkline Monster bills itself as a gothic western, although as with Brautigan's In Watermelon Sugar, it borders on science-fiction, or at least hangs out in the same part of town. Its cast comprises fairly typical Brautigan types, freewheeling and easily distracted as they deal with something which is probably almost magic realism with the inevitable interludes for shagging. The monster of the title is an accumulation of powerful and sentient light living in the basement, which comes with its own similarly sentient but long-suffering shadow. As often seems to be the case with Brautigan, the symbolism is positively pregnant with possibilities which the author leaves pretty much to the reader, not least of these being some slightly screwy parallel with the Biblical creation myth in which God says, let there be light, and so there is and the light brings shadow into being - which would probably be the devil; although this light is a complete cunt while its shadow seems to be a fairly sympathetic character. For what it's worth, as a reformed Who obsessive, I also couldn't help but notice some fairly solid parallels with Marc Platt's Ghostlight, although I've no idea if Brautigan served as inspiration. Along vaguely related lines, The Hawkline Monster might also be considered one of those novels which foreshadows the whole Faction Paradox thing without too much squinting.

It's a genuinely wonderful book - tight, witty, and truly peculiar without feeling the need to pull funny faces - and is in all sense a masterpiece; except for some reason it doesn't feel anything like so personal as a few of his other works. It's unmistakably Brautigan but it feels as though the conversation he's having is with himself more than the reader. This is an observation rather than a criticism, but I guess it at least explains my thirty-five year gap as much as anything does.

Crap Holiday

 

Jenny Morrill Crap Holiday (2018)
At the risk of eclipsing a certain orange president in terms of sheer lack of self-awareness, books which began life as blog posts can be a bit of a lottery. That which might seem like the wittiest thing on Earth in the space of five minutes spent scrolling down a screen can turn into a six hour coach trip sat next to the funniest man in the marketing department once transposed to print. I couldn't get past the first ten pages of Jenny Lawson's Let's Pretend This Never Happened and it was the same with David Thorne's I'll Go Home Then; It's Warm and Has Chairs. Cold hard ink on paper plus time somehow exposes failings which might otherwise go unnoticed.

Jenny Morrill tries to avoid the pitfalls by writing something in the spirit of her genuinely wonderful World of Crap blog rather than just selotaping old jokes into a notebook, and mostly it works as a legitimate novel. I say mostly, because the arrows haven't quite lined up with the target here in so much as that the tone of the novel occasionally sits at odds with the subject, and it may be significant that the chapters are mostly short, each being about the length of a blog post - just sufficient length to get in, deliver the gag with a customary roll of the eyes, then get out again.

Melissa is a vaguely directionless young woman with a low tolerance for bullshit who passes long-suffering and caustic commentary on her work, her friends, acquaintances, flatmates, and her entire existence, and she's very, very funny, just as World of Crap is very, very funny, taking grim delight in the absurdity of the shabby and the eternally disappointing. Here she spends four days at a new age festival surrounded by fucking idiots with only a Daniel O'Donnell souvenir mug for intelligent conversation, and it's painful, and great because it's painful, but I could never quite rid myself of the feeling that Melissa simply would never have attended a new age festival, and probably would have faked her own death in order to get out of going, as she pretty much admits in the first person narrative; which leaves us with the possibility of the author having deliberately placed her character in awful situations entirely for the sake of generating sarcasm, which by extension seems a bit easy and obvious - and actually a little like sending Garry Bushell to a gay pride event because you basically know exactly what you're going to get. So while the jokes work and the new age targets are absolutely deserving, the feeling of watching them delivered by conveyor belt only to be picked off one by one somewhat undermines the integrity of Crap Holiday as a novel - as distinct from a series of amusingly withering remarks. Thus when Melissa gets her arse into gear at the end, it ends up reading like something done because that's how this sort of novel is supposed to go.

On the other hand, it is fucking funny in places, and I suspect some of the problem may be that it was written specifically as a comedy where some of it is actually quite grim and probably didn't need to worry about remaining quite so witty on every single page. At best, it reminds me oddly of Brautigan's Dreaming of Babylon - possibly because I read Dreaming of Babylon only the other week - in telling the tale of someone drifting haplessly through their own absurd existence seemingly without much say in where it's going, except that Melissa has a somewhat more dour outlook than Brautigan's private detective.

Regardless of reservations expressed above - none of which really diminish the pleasure of reading this thing - Crap Holiday is almost a great novel, and is impressive for a debut, not least as something written at a tangent to Morrill's usual semiotic deconstruction of old episodes of Rainbow or things found inside packets of seventies breakfast cereal.

Dreaming of Babylon

Richard Brautigan Dreaming of Babylon (1977)
In between bouts of kicking myself for having failed to read more Brautigan earlier, I continue to find delight in each new novel, and so much so that it's hard to avoid the fear of eventually coming to the one that reads like Jeffrey Archer channelling Ted Nugent, at which point the bubble will accordingly burst.

Anyway, it hasn't happened with this one, and Dreaming of Babylon constitutes further evidence of Brautigan's genius despite being some way outside what one might reasonably assume was his comfort zone. Specifically it's a detective novel, or at least a detective novel filtered through the Brautigan lens and seems potentially the least autobiographical of any of his that I've read. The great strength of his writing, I would say, is that it feels so much like personal experience. This one is no exception, so hopefully serves as a testament to the author's imagination.

Dreaming of Babylon presumably differs from much detective fiction in focussing less on the detection and more on the unusually shabby existence of its central character stumbling from one ludicrous scenario to the next, usually failing and failing hard, and keeping himself going by daydreaming of Babylon with what little imagination he has at his disposal - which just about runs to something resembling a Flash Gordon cinema serial. He owes money to everyone, can't find work, has no car, no office, no secretary, can't pay the rent, and is just about getting by on telling lies and the sort of feckless optimism which only the terminally stupid can achieve.

My client whoever they were hadn't arrived yet.

I was very curious about who would show up.

I didn't know whether it would be a man or a woman. If it was a woman, I hoped that she would be very rich and beautiful and she would fall madly in love with me and want me to retire from the private-eye business and live a life of luxury, and I'd spend half my time fucking her, the other half dreaming of Babylon.

We have murder and confrontation, even firearms and knives, but the core of the form - what was done, by whom and why - remains vague, not much more than background detail, just as Dreaming of Babylon is the story of a guy who amounts to background detail in his own daily existence. It's profound, sad, and funny without digging you in the ribs and pulling faces. Actually, it's so profound as to make what's it about seem like a stupid question.

The Abortion

Richard Brautigan The Abortion (1971)
Having thus far failed to come up with a convincing comparison, I've at last realised who Brautigan reminds me of with this one, and it's Borges. The language and the mood are both very different to anything I've read of the Argentinian, but there's common ground in their both having fixated on the written word and language as reality, or as something distinct from reality. Half of Sombrero Fallout, for example, occurs on scraps of paper discarded and tossed into a waste paper basket by a frustrated writer, while The Abortion sets out its stall in a library and features librarians as its main characters; and because it's Brautigan, it's a library of unpublished books, an institution which, rather than being built or founded, seems to have come into existence in organic response to some obscure need within the culture at large. The librarians here are people who ended up in the job without quite meaning to, having mostly just wandered in off the street; and unpublished authors turn up with their manuscripts - typed or handwritten - and add them to the library, sometimes at three in the morning.

Our story begins when Vida shows up with the book she's written about her own body, specifically how she doesn't understand it or particularly relate to it, which is a shame because it's apparently a great body - as Brautigan describes in some detail. Vida has sex with the narrator, becomes pregnant, and so we come to the reason for the title. I wouldn't say alarm bells were quite ringing by this point, but I had my fingers crossed, hoping to avoid a descent into mansplaining and what men may or may not think about abortion. I've seen online criticism of The Abortion suggesting that Brautigan spends a little longer than seems necessary describing Vida's tits and is therefore an oppressive phallocrat of some description, which is, I suppose, one reaction. Of course, the logical extreme of such arguments are that whatever a man may have to say on the topic of abortion will be essentially worthless. I agree in so much as that the casting vote should probably go to the person whose body is directly under discussion, but worthless is too great a reduction which as such seems based on the gender of the speaker more than on the actual potential worth - or otherwise - of anything said. Additionally, human biology is such that certain female physical features have a fucking powerful effect on certain males, and while I recognise that no-one should reduce another person to a mere object, whining about it is probably a waste of time. I guess Brautigan liked boobs, and I also like boobs, none of which necessarily gets in the way of anything else The Abortion may strive to achieve.

Returning to Borges, the library of The Abortion seems to inhabit its own reality, which is something slightly separate from regular reality. Vida is likewise divorced to a certain extent from her own body, which is what her book is about. Brautigan's book is therefore about regular reality imposing itself on those otherwise maintaining some distance from the same, something which tends to happen whether we like it or not - see also certain aspects of human biology. I don't have anything profound or worthwhile to say about abortion, and Brautigan reports without necessarily saying anything beyond that which we mostly know and understand to be approximately true, and so, writing without any of the usual hysteria, manages to avoid shooting himself in the foot as Philip K. Dick did with The Pre-Persons.

The Abortion is, perhaps paradoxically, quite life affirming for something which really could have gone horribly wrong; or at least I found it so.

A Confederate General from Big Sur

Richard Brautigan A Confederate General from Big Sur (1964)
Brautigan's first novel is maybe a little more raggedy around the edges than those he went on to write, but you nevertheless could never mistake it for the work of anyone else. The dry humour is as deeply ingrained in the narrative as ever, with the story being told at the usual tangent to anything the rest of us might regard as reality. The deal here is that one Lee Mellon is the contemporary descendant of a Confederate general, except the general never existed so far as anyone can tell and neither did any of the other allegedly historical foundations upon which Brautigan builds his world of low-level west coast dropouts and amiable losers. Their reality is haphazard, often comical, but sort of heartfelt by terms which will be familiar to anyone who ever read a Freak Brothers comic book. In fact, it's almost Philip K. Dick's A Scanner Darkly but with much softer, more gentle drugs, and hence without the paranoia.

The Confederacy, as was, has become something of a hot topic of late, and not without good reason, suggesting the potential for dunderheads to miss the point of this book; but as ever, Brautigan arranges people and places within situations without editorial or moral commentary, at least assuming that his reader isn't a fucking idiot, which is nice.

I first read The Hawkline Monster when I was nineteen. How the fuck has it taken me this long to catch up?

In Watermelon Sugar

Richard Brautigan In Watermelon Sugar (1968)
Friends have dropped hints about Richard Brautigan ever since I borrowed and enjoyed The Hawkline Monster from Reuben back in the early eighties, and yet somehow I never took those hints. Then I read Sombrero Fallout in 2017, which was great, and then I found this so I suppose you could say I'm picking up the pace, a bit.

In Watermelon Sugar seems to occur in a rural agrarian post-society community. A few online sources describe it as post-apocalypse, but there's probably too much in the way of weird mythology woven through the thing for it to be taken quite so literally - notably the talking tigers and watermelon sugar itself, an improbably versatile building medium derived from watermelons. The name of the community is iDEATH, which is never explained, and nor is the logographically similar name of inBOIL, the bad guy of the piece, or at least the local undesirable. There isn't actually much which is explained in In Watermelon Sugar because it's mostly language stripped down to its most functional in order to describe actions and their consequences, which lends the narrative a thoroughly folksy rhythm. Brautigan isn't going to assume anything here, beyond that readers will most likely be quite capable of forming their own emotions without him having to spell anything out.

The economy of the telling yields a story which feels both mythic and yet with a solid grounding in reality one doesn't often encounter in works of fiction. It's so free of embellishment and unnecessary frippery that it feels real, which actually makes for a truly peculiar and powerful read.

Consider the hint taken.

The Darkening of the Light

Tessa B. Dick The Darkening of the Light (2012)
Philip K. Dick's final novel would, in theory, have been The Owl in Daylight. I've read that it was the novel he was working on at the time of his death, back in 1982, although in the Exegesis he describes it as the book he found himself unable to write, the novel which broke him. His widow, Tessa, published her own version of The Owl in Daylight some years after his death, reputedly utilising some of what he had written, although I could be wrong about that detail. The book was criticised for diverging from what is known of Phil's original outline, and was in any case withdrawn from publication in response to objections made by the estate of the author.

The Darkening of the Light introduces itself as an expanded version of an earlier work by the same author, and clearly makes use of certain themes attributed to her version of The Owl in Daylight, and no third party has yet tried to have it withdrawn from publication so far as I'm aware, so let's just try to enjoy the fact of its existence and current availability without getting too bogged down in whether or not it should count as the completion of his last great work; because the answer to that one is probably yes and no. If we're treating it as a forensic reconstruction of Phil's last book as it would have been, then we're doomed to disappointment, because yes, of course it diverges and strays from the outline. Most authors diverge and stray from their own outlines, or they do if they're any good; and this was never Kevin J. Anderson expanding something A.E. van Vogt scribbled on the back of a fag packet to full novel length.

To answer a different but arguably more pertinent question, The Darkening of the Light really is a great book. Possibly excepting Frida Kahlo, our culture conditions us to a certain degree of squinting whenever a woman steps out from the shadow of her better publicised husband, but we really need to get over it and judge the work on its own merit rather than by our assumptions.

The Darkening of the Light isn't a Philip K. Dick novel, although it's built upon much of that which preoccupied him in later years, and not because his ex-wife is presenting a mere impersonation, but because she spent time with the guy, understood what made him tick, and has plenty to say on the subject. Her tone actually reminds me a little of Richard Brautigan, if anything, which is well suited to analysis of the nature of reality, and - most refreshingly - she writes with a gentle sense of humour, and a wonderfully understated pleasure taken in the absurd.

When Teddy arrived home on Friday afternoon, wistfully daydreaming about Lorelei, instead of a little stucco house he found himself standing in front of a stone temple with statues of grotesque gargoyles standing on either side of the entrance, a double door made of iron that refused to open when he pushed and pulled on it. This turn of events did not surprise him, since he had found that some sort of punishment was always imposed upon him whenever he made an unethical choice.

This pleases me greatly because this is the detail of Philip K. Dick's writing which everyone misses, hence all those groaning po-faced blue and orange movies with handsome young men questioning the reality of their own photogenic existences within what usually looks like a Nine Inch Nails video.

The Darkening of the Light is significantly more playful than we might expect, and is about - as you might anticipate - our relationship with reality, death, and I suspect represents Tessa B. Dick coming to terms with the passing of a husband. Without having known the man, I've always wondered about his attitude to women, specifically the repeating cycle of partners who age into reputedly stifling harridans from which the only relief is some newer, younger model; so it's nice to get something from the perspective of a better half, and a perspective which balances boldly honest reportage of his failings with a warm regard which I personally found both moving and something of a relief - he may have been hard work at times, but I guess it wasn't all uphill.

In terms of mood, the novel additionally reminds me a little of the immersive and autobiographical A War of Witches in which anthropologist T.J. Knab describes his life amongst the curanderas of rural Mexico. Knab's book runs with the idea that we each lead a post-mortem existence in Talokan, the realm beneath the Earth, and that this is also the place we visit when we dream. The Darkening of the Light feels very much like a communication of similar spirit, and without doing anything particularly spectacular or flashy, is one of the best novels I've read in a while. Whether or not this is the closest we'll come to reading Phil's Owl in Daylight probably doesn't matter.

Sombrero Fallout

Richard Brautigan Sombrero Fallout (1976)
I read and enjoyed The Hawkline Monster about thirty years ago, and yet somehow never quite got around to that second Brautigan novel, not even out of curiosity when Pump recorded their Sombrero Fallout album and named it after this - Pump being the vessel in which Andrew Cox had set forth across the musical landscape, and Andrew Cox being my buddy who departed for that great off licence in the sky back in 2009. This copy of Sombrero Fallout turned up in a second hand book store, and in doing so drew to my attention how rarely it is that his books seem to turn up in second hand book stores; which, I suppose, is at least part of the reason. I couldn't just walk away from it, although truthfully, there was something which put me off. I've known a few Caucasian males with a thing for Japanese or otherwise Asiatic women, and whilst I can think of one dude who isn't a weirdo - at least not for that reason - I've often found myself deeply suspicious of this attraction which, in some cases, seems based almost entirely on the exotic credentials of the gals in question. That they're small, supposedly inscrutable, childlike, and passive seem to be the considerations at the core of their appeal amongst a certain type of male; and for what it's worth, I always thought Shonen Knife were shit as well.

Anyway, I felt like Sombrero Fallout might pander to this tendency, at least based on the cover, and happily I was very wrong. Yukiko, the ethnically Japanese woman who walks out on her slightly neurotic Caucasian lover constitutes subject rather than object within the narrative, and is exotic only in the thoughts of her spurned partner.

As the novel opens, our man tears something he's written from the typewriter and tosses it into the waste paper basket. The reject is a tale of what happens when a sombrero falls from a clear sky to land in the street of a small town, and the story expands under its own steam within the confines of the waste paper basket. The sombrero is seen by the mayor and two others, an argument ensues, which quickly expands by chain reaction into a full scale riot complete with a body count. Meanwhile the guy who decided not to write the story spends an hour failing to come to terms with his rejection by Yukiko, and so reveals why she probably made the right choice.

Brautigan has an extraordinary focus on the details of the story almost to the point of it being nothing but detail, as though his business is with the atomic structure of the narrative. This focus presents something which appears deceptively simple and feels somehow nourishing, like it's good for you in the same way as an avocado. In some respects it reminds me of Kurt Vonnegut's writing, but more sleek and efficient, with everything right where it needs to be and not a tangent in sight. Brautigan also seems to share Vonnegut's concerns about the future of the planet and the stupid shit humanity gets caught up in from time to time.

Sombrero Fallout is vaguely an allegory of the convoluted relationship between Japan and America, or at least about aspects of the same; but it's an allegory in the sense of certain Surrealist paintings being allegorical, just as Magritte wasn't necessarily painting men in bowler hats. Here we have the sombrero as  mushroom cloud, and the dissolution which comes in its wake, which turns out to be more or less all that is needed to tell the story. Sombrero Fallout therefore feels very much like a complete thing in itself, self-contained and close enough to being a perfect novel as makes no difference.