Richard Brautigan, Revenge of the Lawn (1972, Picador 1974 – with British spelling!)
A Book Group member was given a copy of this book by his son, and thought it would be a good quick read for our December meeting, when there are so many competing demands on our time. None of the nearby libraries had copies, and I may have got the last one listed in Australia at AbeBooks. Other members of the Group made do with PDFs. So I was feeling pleased with myself when I opened my slightly stained book, formerly the possession of one Kerry Thomson. That pleasure had pretty much evaporated 50 pages later. It was only corps d’esprit that kept me going: if David and Keith had persevered with the Coetzee book in spite of finding nothing there to interest or please them, surely I could hack another hundred or so pages of underdeveloped twaddle – reminiscence, dream fragments, quirky observations – snapped up by a publisher confident it would sell on the coattails of Trout Fishing in America, published about a decade earlier. That was my state of mind after reading 12 of the book’s 62 pieces.
Things improved at about page 60. It was probably the piercing nostalgia for childhood games in ‘The Ghost Children of Tacoma’ that dispelled my irritated boredom. After that, I was drawn in mainly by pieces capturing (or perhaps re-imagining) moments from his childhood: ‘Blackberry Motorist’, in which he discovers an abandoned car under a high tangle of blackberries; ‘The Post Offices of Eastern Oregon’, a kind of Lake Wobegon horror story; ‘One Afternoon in 1939’, in which he tells a story his little daughter loves to hear, and ends beautifully, ‘I think she uses this story as a Christopher Columbus door to the discovery of her father when he was a child and her contemporary’; ‘A Complete History of German and Japan’, which would be great without the nudging of the terrible title.
After another 50 pages or so, the whimsical observations of life in San Francisco bars, buses, streets, bedrooms and bookshops became the dominant mode, and I lost interest again.
I came across a thoroughgoing web site devoted to all things Brautigan, and found a page giving the place of first publication of these stories. A good number first appeared in Rolling Stone and I’m sure they sat comfortably with the dope and psychedelia of its pages. Mostly they haven’t travelled well. And I haven’t even mentioned the casual sexism.
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I wrote that a couple of weeks ago when I’d just read the book. Tonight the Group met, at a very expensive Japanese restaurant, where we managed to have an interesting conversation about the book before ranging off in a hundred other directions. There was genral agreement that the quality was patchy, but my impression is that other people enjoyed the book as a whole much more than I did. One guy had read it in the 70s, so this reading was partly an exercise in nostalgia. The frequent quirky similes, which irritated me, gave delight to others. One comment was that the prose generally left a lot of room for the reader to fill out the picture, in contrast to a lot of recent writing that corrals your response leaving you nowhere to go but where the writer decides. I didn’t understand what he meant until he said that the reading made him think back to his own childhood – and I realised that for me that was a good part of the childhood stories’ the appeal: some of them, at least, triggered a mood of reminiscence, of reflection on my own childhood with a kind of openness to wonder. And of course it was worth ploughing through a fair amount of unaffecting stuff to have that.
Me fail? I fly! 