Atchity,1982

"A Refrain along Brautigan's Oddpath"
Kenneth Atchity
Los Angeles Times Book Review, 19 Sep. 1982, p. 8.
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Fans of Richard Brautigan will find this experimental novel disappointing; his literary biographers will find it curious. What Brautigan refers to as "the oddpaths of imagination" are not as odd, nor even as pathlike, here as they are in his best works.

Trout Fishing in America, The Hawkline Monster and the delightful stories contained in Revenge of the Lawn establish Brautigan's credentials as a unique cross between Kafka and Mark Twain. The humor is wry, the voice is of uncertain distance from sometimes banal, sometimes surreal, events. The style is always terse and generally constructed with the fine precision of successful one-liners.

Traces of the familiar ironic self-deprecation can be found in So The Wind: "His parents really loved him./"I could tell by the way they talked to him./"My mother just barely tolerated my existence . . . Once in a while she would go through short periods of intense affection toward me. It would always make me quite nervous and I was glad when she went back to just tolerating my existence."

At other times, the whimsical atmosphere of nostalgia dives headlong into the maudlin: "Also, old people just tended to like me. I had a quality that appealed to them. Maybe they liked me because I was interested in them and listened to what they had to say. It could have been that simple."

Throughout the story, based on the narrator's most traumatic childhood experience, Brautigan inserts a refrain: "So the Wind Won't Blow It All Away/Dust . . . American . . . Dust." For a stylist whose trademark is subtlety and ironic understatement at the most dramatic moments, the refrain becomes increasingly heavy handed.

Despite failure to hold matters together, the ghost of Brautigan past makes its presence known. The death scene is skillful and effective, and shows the promise otherwise missing in the experiment. The slow-motion action recalls his ability to let us observe comedy in the making: "The dock itself was three 10-inch planks that were about two inches thick. They were also hand-carved and then finely polished until a king could have eaten off them. It would have been interesting to watch a king eat directly off a dock."

In The Hawkline Monster, Brautigan gave us a character obsessed with counting, in the footsteps of earlier characters obsessed with trout, watermelons or Kool-Aid. This time the narrator presents his autobiography as though it were nothing but the memory of obsessions—with beer cans, funerals, fishing, hambrugers: "The only thing that was my fault was that I didn't buy that hamburger. If I had only wanted a hamburger that day, everything would have been completely different."

We realize that an obsession is no more than a system, and a system is subordinating everything in experience to a single thing.

Some systems work, others fail. The narrator looks over the obsessions of his past and realizes they've failed to help him overcome the greatest trauma of his childhood. The only system that works only works when it's allowed to be true to itself, despite the pain that causes memory.

"A lot of bad things happen to people in this life they just don't want to be reminded of, so they move away and try living someplace else where they can forget unpleasant things . . . and start all over again and build up some good memories."

Trauma becomes obsession becomes memory becomes diminished vision and fragmentd soul. Obsessed with his memories, the narrator seeks to exorcise them with this record. The refrains, as he circles in on expressing the pain, haunt him—even if they don't successfully haunt us.

Campbell,1982

"The Young Adult Perplex: A Review of Deadeye Dick and So the Wind Won't Blow It All Away"
Patty Campbell
Wilson Library Bulletin, Dec. 1982, pp. 334-335, 365-366.
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"My wife has been killed by a machine which should never have come into the hands of any human being. It is called a firearm. It makes the blackest of all human wishes come true at once, at a distance; that something die.

"There is evil for you.

"We cannot get rid of mankind's fleetingly wicked wishes. We can get rid of the machines that make them come true.

"I give you a holy word: DISARM."

So it goes in an editorial in the Midland City Bugle-Observer in 1944, according to Kurt Vonnegut in his new novel, Deadeye Dick. The bereaved is the editor of a small town newspaper and the innocent murderer is twelve-year-old Rudy Waltz. The victim is the editor's pregnant wife, who is struck down by a stray bullet while she vacuums. The bullet is casually fired into the air by Rudy from the cupola of his father's house in a moment of idle bravado. The woman is buried, the editor moves away, but Rudy (now known as Deadeye Dick) and his parents stay on in Midland City to live lives shriveled and blasted by the consequences of that one ill-fated moment.

The evil power of guns, even in the hands of innocents who mean no evil, is the theme of three powerful new novels by three acknowledged masters of the form. They are the previously mentioned Deadeye Dick, So the Wind Won't Blow It All Away by that darling of the sixties, Richard Brautigan, and A Midnight Clear by William Wharton, author of Birdy and Dad. All three writers have proven YA [Young Adult] appeal, and their latest novels should have the magic for that hard-to-reach group—sixteen- and seventeen-year-old boys.

In each the sharp crack of a foolishly misfired bullet hangs over the pages, but the real story is about adolescent lives forever after twisted into remorse and guilt by the bullet's fatal impact. In the hands of less skillful writers, this grim theme could be unbearable, but Vonnegut and Brautigan, and to a lesser extent Wharton, are wise in their awareness of the human comedy, the cosmic belly laugh, and the bizarre ironies of a snickering fate. These books are fun to read. It is only later that we notice that the grin is on the face of a skull.

Deadeye Dick is the story of Rudy Waltz, who, like Billy Pilgrim of Slaughterhouse Five, is a meek, small-town pharmacist. His childhood, up until the moment he pulls the trigger in the cupola, has been spent happily with his cheerful, egomaniacal father and his colorless mother in what is probably the only medieval tower in Ohio. The father, Otto Waltz, sustained by the family wealth, has lived a flamboyant life wenching and drinking in Vienna, sharing student escapades with Adolf Hitler, and building himself a fictitious reputation as a painter. The world's famous and infamous stop by to visit on their way through the Midwest (the night Eleanor Roosevelt comes to dinner is Vonnegut at his best). All this is ruined on the day Otto awards his twelve-year-old son the key to the gun room. The rest is aftermath. The town takes casual but lasting retribution. Years later, after Rudy has lived a lifetime of atonement, the United States government, in an equally casual and lasting misfire, destroys the entire population of Midland City with a neutron bomb. An ironic mega-metaphor for Rudy's innocent murder—or perhaps the reverse.

In outline, So the Wind Won't Blow It All Away seems to be a very similar story. A lonely, young boy is shooting in a field with an older boy whom he idolizes; a stray bullet goes wrong and severs the older boy's femoral artery. The jury acquits the young killer of his friend's death. The kids at school stop speaking to him. The boy atones symbolically by throwing himself into an obsession with hamburgers: Should he have bought a hamburger instead of bullets on the fateful day? Brautigan, however, is a far gentler soul than Vonnegut. Vonnegut can be savagely cynical, but Brautigan is amused end bemused, entranced and baffled by all that goes on and may or may not mean something. His characters are nice, if somewhat peculiar, people who just do the best they can. The music is sad, but the melody is pleasing to the ear and somehow consoling.

Vonnegut and Brautigan are fascinated with time. Their novels are puzzles pulled apart into little pieces and put back together in disjointed sections until the whole pattern emerges. For this reason, these books require a bit of literary sophistication from readers—although sometimes YAS seem to have an easier time with nonlinear narratives than older people.

In So the Wind Won't Blow It All Away, the sudden, arbitrary death of a young person is echoed by several events that brush the boy's life in his early years: Does the future influence the present? The foreground event in the book continues to happen as a fixed point in time, while the rest of the narrative is assembled behind it. A large, heavy couple in bib overalls and tennis shoes drive an old pickup truck down a dirt road toward a pond. The truckbed contains their living room furniture. When they arrive at the pond, they unload it all, sit on the sofa, and fish. The narrator watches this pointless moment, which goes on like the drone in a bagpipe performance. This sequence is allowed to finish happening only at the end of the novel, when the story of the accidental shooting is complete. The effect is to impose a sense of order and completion on what is otherwise a tale of the random meaninglessness of human pain.

A Midnight Clear, like the pseudonymous William Wharton's other two novels, is certainly destined to become a classic. With the originality that we have come to expect from him, Wharton has given us an antiwar novel that is one of the best of its kind ever written. The time is mid-December 1944. A squad of six American soldiers has been sent to occupy an abandoned chateau in the Forest of Ardennes. They are the survivors of an ASTPR unit, which is made up of specially selected, high-scoring, college reservists, and they are all very brilliant, very tired of war, and heartbreakingly young. Four are still in their teens.

In the depths of the snowy night, they begin to hear strange sounds and see strange sights: German voices singing and calling to them, a snow scarecrow, a lighted Christmas tree. At last they realaize that a German squad posted across the hill is making overtures for surrender. They meet cautiously with the "enemy" and plan to stage a mock battle to cover the surrender. But in their concern for each other, they make a fatal mistake. They keep the plan a secret from the one married man in the squad, plotting to give him credit for the prisoners as a gift that will take him home to his wife on the wings of a combat medal. And again a misfired gunshot brings the collapse of meaning and structure. But Wharton's characters, unlike those of Brautigan and Vonnegut, are not alone. While the other two books only pose a question, A Midnight Clear gives a glimpse of an answer.

Cohen,1982

"Fulfillment Elusive, Brautigan Reminds Us"
Joseph Cohen
New Orleans Times-Picayune, 5 Sep. 1982, Sec. 3, p. 12.
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Gary Snyder once said that Richard Brautigan's writing consisted of "flowers for the void."

This new novel might be described as a small but flawless bunch of violets laid at the feet of the past in the cemetery of the mind. It is typical Brautigan, clever, entertaining, filled with the author's delight over the unexpected success of the images his combinations of words evoke, saturated with the milk of human kindness, sometimes corny, always whimsical, ever aware that his talents and good nature are inadequate defenses against the assaults of 20th-century life.

Chief among these assaults is the certainty of loss. From the beginning of his career, Brautigan has scrutinized that certainty in our counsciousness. Whatever the abundance of life and the grasping for it, sustained fulfillment, he reminds us, is fairly elusive. Tragedies, minor and major, are usually our lot. That seems to be the way of the world.

At the close of his first book, Trout Fishing in America, which established his reputation, the once teeming trout stream, like a used and abandoned car, its insides worn, ends up in a junkyard, to be sold piecemeal. In this most recent work, an empty rocking chair by a catfish pond, salvaged in the middle-aged man's memory of his boyhood, is all that remains of the nameless couple, long since dead, who brought their living room furniture nightly to the water's edge, to fish in comfort while the young boy looked on.

Loss in this minor key is merely the prelude to loss in a major chord. Life is bad but not all that bad for this fatherless waif who, when ignored by his preoccupied mother, finds his friendships in the summer mainly among old alcoholics, recluses and the nameless couple fishing from their makeshift living room. When the winter comes, it brings, with it the spectre of death which has stalked the boy from the age of five when he watched a child's funeral and realized its meaning.

Seven years after, the spectre catches up to him. The tragedy of that 12th year involves his accidentally shooting and killing his casual companion, a schoolmate, the town's brightest hope for the future, while the two of them are using rotten apples in an abandoned orchard for target practice.

Like the light breeze that played across the catfish pond in summer, the story is told simply, with Brautigan's teasing charm beguiling us across the pages, time present spun into past, past and future woven into the present, pregant with foreboding.

The summer breeze is a diversion; it is the winter wind of this child's discontent that must be stayed if the true meaning of his disorder and early sorrow is to emerge. And emerge it does, for Brautigan's conscience, never far from the surface, directs us to the inescapable message, that whether we will or no we remain our brother's keepers, necessarily sharing guilt and responsibility; in this instance, for continuing a generations old but nonetheless outrageous custom of putting BB guns and .22 rifles into the hands of children as though it were a required rite of passage.

The deeply embedded guilt the boy turned middle-aged man feels 35 years later is not without redemptive significance. Brautigan's narrator attempts to set things right in a world long gone awry, if by nothing more than repeating his story, like the Ancient Marinerexternal link. He is compelled to tell it "so the wind won't blow it all away." "Dust . . . American . . . Dust" out of the past it may be, but only through emphasizing this refrain—it occurs 10 times in the text—can he make us see the link between adult folly and the child's tragedy.

As in the Mariner's tale, Brautigan's story is both an act of expiation and a warning, one the gun enthusiasts and lobbyists have ignored for years. Since they are dead set on expanding the void, we are ever more dependent on Brautigan's flowers.

DeMarinis,1982

"Brautigan's Stylish Touch Turns a Grim Story into a Fairy Tale"
Rick DeMarinis
Chicago Tribune, 3 Oct. 1982, Sec. 7, p. 3.
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This is Richird Brautigan's 10th novel. As I read it, a thought kept coming beck to me: "It must be hard to be Richard Brautigan." I'm not speaking of his personal life, of which I know nothing, but of Richard Brautigan the literary stylist. For that is what he is. He is one of the very few living American writers whose "way" of writing makes his work instantly identifiable. It was hard, we now know, to be Ernest Hemingway, another remarkable stylist. What makes it hard to have a way of writing that is so totally your own is that the temptation to imitate yourself in dry spells is very great. When Hemingway fell into that trap, his sympathizers groaned and his detractors gloated. I haven't read all of Brautigan's work, so I can't say that he has ever been victimized in this way by his individuality. What I can report, happily, is that this new novel is as authentic as the wonderful Trout Fishing in America and A Confederate General From Big Sur. His fans will not groan.

So the Wind Won't Blow It All Away has a solemn theme: the death of children. But it is told in the usual Brautigan manner—lightly, obliquely, warmly and with a loving eye that lingers on the exhausted edges of the American experience rather than on the bristling, kinetic center. The narrator of this circumlocutory tale looks back on a terrible event that brought his childhood to an abrupt close at the age of 14. When he shoots at a pheasant with his .22 rifle, a stray hollow-point bullet finds the femoral artery in his best friend's thigh. The wounded boy dies swiftly while his helpless friend watches. The design of the novel leads the reader gradually toward this grim accident by taking him through a series of childhood experiences that are as mysterious as they are mundane. This insistence that profound mystery lies in the familiar textures of everyday life is an enduring American literary habit, started perhaps by Whitman, and reaching an exuberant high with the Beats. Brautigan, though, is funnier and more relaxed about it than either Whitman or the Beats. He hasn't the frenetic urgency of Whitman or the restless energy of the Satori-seekers of the 1950s. With Brautigan, this consciousness of the utter peculiarity of things is never articulated as philosophy but rather is an imminent feature of his style.

There are those who think "style" is a bad word. It suggests artificiality to them. They see it as an ornament. Tell it straight, they hoot. To them, style is a self-indulgent mannerism that avoids the pressures of reality. In fact, style is the way a writer sees the world. It is a manifestation of his vision. Writers without style, who see the world "straight," leave the awful mysteries of this life untouched. The stylus of style cuts into the enamel surface of reality so that it will bleed a little of its secret.

Brautigan's stylus works on a world locked into terminal despair. In his neighborhoods, paltry backyard gardens are out of kilter, and even the kids playing in the yards look "defeated and out of kilter, too, Instead of being born, they just could have been ears of corn left over from last autumn's harvest." And: "Low flat gray smoke came from the chimneys of the houses. The smoke had a lot of trouble getting any distance into the air, so it just hung there like strange useless sheets that could have been hanging on an odd clothesline."

The normal world for Brautigan exists as a kind of embarrassing myth. You are supposed to believe in it in the way very young children are supposed to believe in Santa and the Easter bunny; and, if you are a character in a Brautigan novel, you wait for it to happen to you, but in the meantime you have become gray and strange, the substance of your personality eroded by a steady runoff of bafflement and bad luck. This novel is well-stocked with characters who have become gray and strange as the normal world floats beyond their reach like a pastel mirage. These are people who live in little shacks made out of packing crates, or in apartments above funeral parlors. One very large couple truck their living-room furniture to the edge of a pond so that they can enjoy the comforts of home while fishing for bluegill. The novel opens with the narrator inviting the reader to wait, with him, for these wonderfully imaginative people to arrive at the pond with their truckload of furniture. And we continue to wait—the promise of their arrival is the novel's single strategy—until they finally show up in the last pages like a fairy tale come true.

The dead boy, David, is "the crystallization of excellence and normality." He is a citizen of the bright world that has by-passed the world of the narrator. The friendship makes no sense to either one of them and exists almost as an awkward secret. But even high school heroes with promising futures have needs that the normal world won't or can't give credence to. In David's case, it's his disturbing dreams. The narrator is the only person David can confide in. There is something terrifying in his dreams that he can't quite see. Something ominous. The narrator, alive with dreams, has a natural interest that makes him the perfect listener. For him the world itself has the unpredictable movement of a dream. This is an alien way of perceiving reality. The nomal world, exemplified by David, cannot accept it. Consequently, the approaching peril cannot be seen.

So the Wind Won't Blow It All Away is a lyrical meditation told in a warm, personal voice. As you read, you have the feeling of listening to a friend ram on about serious things in a lighthearted manner as you both drive down an old abandoned highway toward a grand little pond the world has forgotten. The pond hasn't changed much in the last 30 or 40 years, and the bluegill are hitting.

Hunter,1982

"Brautigan's Latest: 'Gentle, Brief, Slippery'"
Timothy A. Hunter
Baltimore Sun, 5 Sep. 1982, p. D5.
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Some authors write novels that are challenging, difficult, maybe even painful to read. Yet, when you finish their books, their characters, images and ideas linger in your mind for days, weeks, or months.

Other writers, like Richard Brautigan, master of the one-sitting novel, turn out books that require no effort to read, but leave less impact on your consciousness than your neighbor's latest batch of vacation slides.

It's been 20 minutes since I put down Brautigan's latest, and I can hardly remember a thing about it, except that the hour I spent reading it was not unpleasant.

Wait a minute. If I really concentrate, a few of Brautigan's images creep into my mind like hazy childhood memories. I can see a young boy searching for the cosmic essence of hamburgers. I see the boy weeping in a tree after the nicest kid in the neighborhood has suddenly died. I see the boy watching funerals out his window the way other kids watch television.

Television! That's it, the book takes place in the late 1940s, "before television crippled the imagination of America and turned people indoors and away from living out their own fantasies with dignity."

I see the post-war, pre-tube lad watching a strange, fat, middle-class couple set up their living room furniture by a pond. They make themselves comfy and cosy, like present-day fat, middle-class couples who sit in living rooms and watch . . .

I see the boy befriend a number of hermits: one who sells worms in a gas station, one who lives in a packing-crate shack near the pond, one who guards a sawmill. I see the boy accidentally kill someone with his .22 rifle.

Now, if I concentrate even harder (and—let's be honest—return to the text), I can glean specific lines from the book.

Some, like this one, are sweet: "The sun turned boring in the middle of the afternoon, as it so often does for children . . ."

Some, like this one, are playful: "I'm just waiting and this is as good a way to wait as any other way to wait because waiting's all the same anywait."

Some, like this one never end: "I took all my notes and interviews and assorted documents down to the river that flowed by the new town we were exiled to and burned them in a picnic stove that was beside a very sad little Oregon zoo that barely had any animals and they were all wet because it was raining again as was the fate of that land."

Some, like this one are uninspired: "That cricket sounded so loud and so good that he could have been a star in a Walt Disney movie."

Yes, the novel is starting to come back. Little tidbits of whimsy, tiny drops of sadness, sentimental shadows, children who don't watch TV, children who won't grow up—these are the modest gifts So the Wind Won't Blow It All Away has to offer.

Now at this juncture I remember much more about this novel than I do about the other Brautigan books I've read and assuredly, though evanescently, enjoyed. About The Hawkline Monster: A Gothic Western I recall something vaguely erotic and nebulously monstrous. About Willard and His Bowling Trophies: A Perverse Mystery I dimly recall some quirky brotherly shenanigans. About Sombrero Fallout: A Japanese Novel I remember nothing.

So it goes with Brautigan. His new novel is gentle, brief and slippery. There are, to say the least, less pleasurable ways to spend an hour.

But I doubt I'll remember much about it in a month, or in a week, or tomorrow.

Kane,1982

"Naive Tone Perfect for Brautigan Novel"
Jean Kane
Indianapolis Star, 19 Sep. 1982, p. F4.
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After changes upon changes, Richard Brautigan is more or less the same. The author who first gained prominence as a counterculture voice in 1967 (Trout Fishing in America) now often abandons contemporary settings in order to explore genres such as the mystery and the western, but his prose still reads like whimsy incarnate.

If So the Wind Won't Blow it All Away is any sort of definitive authorial statement, the present is much too bleak for such fragile musings. The novelette is almost entirely a flashback to the narrator's childhood, during and after World War II. "In those days," says the adult, "people made their own imagination, like home cooking."

Whitey, the narrator, remembers these years fondly, in spite of the hardship they engendered. His family, subsisting on welfare, was perpetually en route to still shabbier quarters, and his mother, a single parent, slid into an emotional decline that paralleled her financial one. She looms like a shadow in Whitey's recollections. His sisters are barely mentioned.

Brautigan's sensibilities fit those of a child remarkably well. His characteristic elevation of small details to the status of major revelations suits a naive consciousness, and his stylistic reliance on non sequitur and odd juxtaposition rarely sounds contrived. Even Brautigan's simple syntax helps establish the narrative voice of an earnest, withdrawn boy.

Whitey enjoyed the company of adults. He was initially fascinated with an alcoholic saw-mill guard who dispensed his refundable beer bottles among the local children, and later, with an old man who lived in a packing-crate house at edge of a pond.

His keenest interest was reserved, however, for a middle-aged couple who visited the opposite side of the pond. There, they frequently set up a living room—complete with couch, tables, lamps and family portraits—in order to fish, eat and sit.

The theme of Whitey's other obsession is death. He first realized his own mortality when he was 5, as he watched a child-sized casket being borne from the mortuary his family then resided above. This morbid concern continued for several years. Whitey never saw a child die, but witnessed loss through the disappearance of toys from once-littered lawns and porches.

Both themes foreshadow the climactic event of Whitey's life, the death that marked the end of his childhood. Symbolically, this event also serves to close America's age of innocence. The adults Whitey knew were materially poor, but nonetheless content with simple pleasures. Impoverished dwellings drew them outside, and tedium forced them to turn to their inner lives for excitement.

This romantic vision of the past becomes problematic only when Brautigan hammers home generalities, instead of letting the story speak for itself. For instance, Whitey stands at the pond conjuring the living room, which "looked like a fairy tale functioning happily in the post-World War II gothic of America before television crippled the imagination of America and people turned indoors and away from living out their own fantasies with dignity."

As a child's tale, Wind is convincing and passably wrought; when it must support ham-handled social commentary, the parable breaks down.

One could reasonably argue that even watching television is an improvement over carting a living room out to a pond for fun—at least modern folk escape the rain. And the myth of the happy poor has become so trite that only a president may resort to it with impunity.

But the moralizing does not intrude the narrative frequently, and Whitey's child-consciousness takes care of the rest: Whimsy does not sit easily in adult mouths. Like Brautigan, it is an acquired taste.

Kline,1982

"Gentle 'Wind' Stirs up Tragic Boyhood Memory"
Betsy Kline
Kansas City Star, 29 Aug. 1982, p. 10L.
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"I wish I had been hungry for a hamburger instead of bullets." writes the 47-year-old narrator of Richard Brautigan's newest novel, So the Wind Won't Blow It All Away.

Having uttered this riveting pronouncement, the wistful, nameless protagonist rolls back the clock to the late 1940s. He interweaves spellbinding vignettes of an earlier life, when the innocence and imagination of his youth pierced the bleak postwar daze and took pleasure in the simple gifts of nature not yet obscured by the glare of the TV tube.

Like a benign Johnny Appleseed, Mr. Brautigan scatters the tidbits of his story, meandering through time and several locations, sowing the slightly askew but insightful commentary of a 12-year-old boy whose deprivations have made him more keenly aware of the value of the basic human being.

The author will not be rushed into explaining how, in his fateful 12th year, his purchase of a box of bullets instead of a hamburger brought that innocence to a tragic end. All in good time, he tells us gently. Memories must be laid to rest respectfully—so the wind won't blow it all away.

Mr. Brautigan is in beautiful form in his latest novel. The barebones simplicity of his storytelling—as he has demonstrated repeatedly in books such as Trout Fishing in America, In Watermelon Sugar, A Confederate General From Big Sur, The Abortion: An Historical Romance 1966 and The Tokyo-Montana Express—goes directly to the heart of the matter.

His delivery in So the Wind Won't Blow It All Away is that of an older and wiser man with the unmuddied vision of a child. A bicycle left out in the rain after its young owner dies, the tiny casket at the funeral of an unknown child, the stigma of a cruddy pair of tennis shoes—all are weighty reflections tinged with emotion.

As a fatherless boy sharing a welfare existence with his mother and sisters, the young boy/narrator re-creates the sights, sounds and smells of small Pacific Northwest towns that drift in and out of their meager lives.

So the Wind Won't Blow It All Away is an eloquent elegy for rustic simplicity, childish pursuits and harmless fantasy. Just before the tragic accident that will alter his life, the young boy/narrator remembers:

"I was 12 years old, and nobody paid any attention to a kid with a rifle standing in front of a filling station, drinking a root beer.

"Needless to say, America bas changed from those days of 1948. If you saw a 12-year-old kid with a rifle standing in front of a filling station today, you'd call out the National Guard and probably with good provocation. The kid would be standing in the middle of a pile of bodies."

Played against the backdrop of this happy-sad nostalgia is an amusing scenario that Mr. Brautigan advances haltingly, frame by frame. The boy is fascinated with a curious couple who drives a pickup truck down a dusty, rutted road to the fishing pond every evening and carefully unloads furniture—couches, lamps and National Geographics—in a wall-less approximation of a living room.

"I sat there watching their living room shining out of the dark beside the pond. It looked like a fairy tale functioning happily in the post-World War II Gothic of America before the television crippled the imagination of America and turned people indoors away from living out their own fantasies with dignity."

Lippman,1982

"The New Brautigan: A Silly Pretension"
Amy Lippman
San Francisco Chronicle, 2 Sep. 1982, p. 55.
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Richard Brautigan's lastest work is a thin piece of labored eccentricity.

Brautigan, who promised us a fresh voice and exciting narrative style in his 1967 novel, Trout Fishing in America, has been unsuccessful in fulfilling the standard of quality and orginality he established in that exceptional first work.

Trout Fishing wove distinctive, poetic fragments of experience and dream into a rich tapestry of fiction. But the rhetoric of allusion and metaphor that abounds in So The Wind Won't Blow It All Away ultimately fails to come together as a polished novel.

This is the story of a 12-year-old's experiences in small-town post-World War II America, when a young boy's days were occupied with little more than fishing and collecting beer bottles for deposit from the alcoholic on the edge of the lake.

Brautigan recounts the tale as a 47-year-old man looking back on the event that surrounded a fatal accident of his boyhood.

The narrative awkwardly stumbles from past to present and back again. Ineffectively organizing the story's chronology, it serves only to tangle and detract. Where this retrospective approach might have offered insight and depth to an understanding—both ours and the narrator's—of the boy's personality, it serves no purpose here.

Brautigan is at his best when his thoughts and prose detour from the novel's weak and incidental plot, exploring instead the peculiarities that engage his characters: his mother's fear of gas stoves, the boy's obssession with death, the family that brings an entire living rooom to the shore of the lake in order to fish from the sofa.

When recounting these details, Brautigan's voice is that of his young protagonist, and we can credit any narrative irrationality to the inconsistency of childish observation.

But the author feels obliged to tie these delicate wanderings to events which have no bearing, and, consequently, they remain contrivances.

Brautigan intends So The Wind Won't Blow It All Away to be an American Tragedy, but the novel is too inconsequential to make his design for it little more than a silly pretension.

What is more disappointing is that Brautigan has demonstrated before, in the earliest of his nine novels, that he is indeed a fine writer. His observations can be sharp and amusing; his prose profound; his metaphors dazzling.

In his more recent efforts, however, thematic ambition has exceeded the structural limitations of style, and So The Wind Won't Blow It All Away proves no exception.

Brautigan's many enthusiasts will surely be disappointed for it would seem that this author's technique has been lying out by the fish pond for too long and has begun to rust.

Montrose,1983

David Montrose
The Times Literary Supplement [London], 22 Apr. 1983, p. 399.
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In literature at least, the American Dream has, over the decades, undergone a gradual transformation. At one time striving towards a golden future, its believers now more often look back sadly at a past that is irrecoverable except in memory. Certainly, this is true of Richard Brautigan's latest novel, where the wistfulness that characteristically informs this author's work has deepened into melancholy, driving out most traces of his idiosyncratic humour. We have here no fantasy, few bizarre metaphors, no eccentric chapter headings.

Writing in 1979, the narrator—Brautigan himself or someone very like him—preserves in print recollections of a 1940s childhood for reasons summarized in the novel's leitmotif:

"So the Wind Won't Blow It All Away

"Dust . . . American . . . Dust"

Two memories are of particular significance. One is a vivid mental snapshot of a fat, middle-aged husband and wife fishing at the local pond on a summer evening in 1947. They have brought their living room furniture with them: not only a couch to fish from, but an easy chair, end tables, a clock, framed pictures. For the narrator, the scene represents a lost America:

"I sat there watching their living room shining out of the dark beside the pond. It looked like a fairy tale functioning happily in the post-World War II gothic of America before television crippled the imagination of America and turned people indoors and away from living out their own fantasies with dignity."

The second memory, revealed gradually, concerns the narrator's fateful decision one day to buy shells for his .22 rifle instead of a hamburger in thc restaurant next to the gunshop. A short while later, on February 17, 1948 (a date inscribed on the mind), he kills his best friend, David, in a shooting accident. Slightly unhinged by the tragedy, the narrator for a time becomes (in the novel's only sustained comic episode) obsessed with hamburgers, believing that, as atonement for having made the wrong choice, he must find out everything about them. Searching for knowledge, he scours books, interviews short-order cooks and butchers. The narrator's childhood ended with David's death. His loss of innocence is directly equated with America's. He remembers, on the day of the accident, standing with his rifle before a filling station, waiting for David to arrive. Nobody paid any attention to him:

"Needless to say, America has changed from those days of 1948. If you saw a twelve-year-old kid with a rifle standing in front of a filling station today, you'd call out the National Guard and probably with good provocation. The kid would be standing in the middle of a pile of bodies."

So The Wind Won't Blow It All Away sees the final demise of Brautigan's one-time optimism about the possibilities of life in contemporary America. It was, of course, always a qualified optimism. In the early novels—A Confederate General from Big Sur, Trout Fishing in America, In Watermelon Sugar, and The Abortion—which were suffused with the hippie ideals of the period, his individualistic characters had to seek their America outside the rat-race, usually in pastoral simplicity. Still, there was at least an America to be sought. Seven years (and three novels) later, with Dreaming of Babylon, the area of possibility shrank to the size of its hero's head: he could realize the good life—money, fame, beautiful women—only through the fantasy movies of his imagination. In the new novel, possibility is entirely absent from both present and future. America is located in an ever-receding stock of memories. The narrator's retrospective dream is to buy the hamburger instead of the shells, thereby extending the idyllic days of childhood. He shuns the here and now. Apart from the two examples quoted, nothing is said about the bad new days. Clearly, their awfulness is so self-evident as to make further statement unnecessary.

Since his first three (and most interesting) novels, Brautigan's work has been increasingly weak on ideas. So The Wind Won't Blow It All Away reverses the process: though essentially a straightforward lament, it still represents the author's most substantial novel since In Watermelon Sugar, even if the untypical tone does make it a less purely enjoyable experience than most of the intervening titles. Potentially, the material is corny in the extreme, but Brautigan handles it well. In the main, he is content to tell a plain tale plainly; the style slips, briefly, only once. Brautigan is especially adept at evoking the everyday magic of childhood: when venturing into an unfamiliar part of the neighbourhood is a real exploit and the funerals leaving the undertaker's next door are a fascinating spectacle. The novel is by no stretch of the imagination a profound or major work. Nevertheless, Brautigan's departure from his customary mode might lead to greater things. After a run of variously disappointing books culminating in The Tokyo-Montana Express, a ragbag of brief sketches, revitalization is more likely in new fields than the well-ploughed furrow.

Morley,1982

"It May Not Be Literature But It's Still Entertaining"
Patricia Morley
Birmingham News, 26 Sep. 1982, p. 6E.
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Richard Brautigan's prose is pure Theater of the Absurd, without the theater. He provides stage, props and play. This short novel is a hard-nosed look at America seen through a kaleidoscope. The mood is bittersweet, its humor whimsical-to-black.

The novel's narrative is simple, even simplistic. A 47-year-old man is looking back at his childhood from five to 15 in the 1940s, and at the strange assortment of crazies who peopled his young life. At five, he stood on a chair to watch early morning funerals at the funeral parlor next door. At 12, he accidentally shoots an older boy, a tragedy which ends his childhood and scars his life. Why, he has asked himself ever since, didn't he buy a hamburger instead of a package of bullets? He had money for one or the other. The plot becomes an image of a nation that has also made some unfortunate choices and been correspondingly scarred.

None of the secondary characters is three-dimensional. They exist half-in, half-out of the narrator's imagination: colorful and bizarre, they are surreal but not synthetic. Their originality has not yet been destroyed by advertising and TV.

The title, and cover photo, are taken from the boy's favorite characters, a grossly fat couple who come nightly to set up their entire living room beside a pond in order to fish and picnic in comfort: "it looked like a fairy tale functioning happily in the post-World War II gothic of America before television crippled the imagination of America and turned people indoors and away from living out their own fantasies with dignity."

The title, followed by "Dust ... American ... Dust," becomes a refrain. Like the plot, a tale of misdirected violence, it symbolizes the nation. The elegy is a lament for a small-town world where individuals mattered.

Brautigan's fiction blends meticulous exactitude with free-ranging imagination. The images are zany but right, sometimes memorable. Lyricism, humor, and a playful profundity work well together in Brautigan's 20th book.

Myerson,1983

"So the Wind Won't Blow It All Away"
Jonathan Myerson
Books & Bookmen, Aug. 1983, p. 35.
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Having covered almost every other American literary traditon with his blend of pastiche and surrealism, Brautigan now moves on to the mental and actual ramblings of a teenage American growing up in the 40s. This must be the ideal format for his style; previous novels have demanded apologies for those mental ramblings—whether the Babylon dreams of his private eye novel or the 186,000 endings for Confederate General. But no apology is required for this hero or his bizarre mixture of naivete and percipience.

So the Wind Won't Blow It All Away begins typically by giving us two confused images: that the narrator once shot somebody, and that he used to watch an elderly couple fish at a local pond. Nothing extraordinary were it not for the fact that the shooting could have been avoided by the purchase of a hamburger(?), or that the couple brings a living room suite (complete with sofa, lamps and stove) from which to fish(??).

The novel goes some way towards explaining these phenomena but they are really only pegs on which the (unnamed) narrator hangs his thoughts and memories. He leads us through fomative years spent watching early morning funerals emerge from the undertaker's next door, his miserable existence on welfare, and his History of The Hamburger Investigation, and so forth.

These recollections build up a relaxed picture of post-War America, of indidental characters and of that childlike ability to question everything and accept it all. As usual, there are unexplained oddities: why does the gas station owner pay for all the fishing worms with nothing but single cent pieces? What did the couple do with all the fish they caught? There are his unique and gloriously unpredictable descriptions of the ordinary: "I put my clothes on very quietly, like a mouse putting on a kleenex," or "Egyptian-mummy-wrapping beige." There is the same tendency to digression: on worm-accounting methodology or fading postcards on a night-watchmen's desk. As Brautigan has the hero admit: "I I was a sneak, but the imagination was where I snuck around." Brautigan has been sneaking around the imaginations of American folk-heroes for years now and finally he has found the character with the most suitable and most fertile wanderlust.

This delightful, gentle novel evokes memories almost, but not quite, out of reach. And what is it that must not be "blown away"? "Dust . . . American . . . Dust"—whose very memories and images of a different lifestyle, a childhood: "A fairy tale before television crippled the imagination of America and turned people indoors and away from living out their own fantasies with dignity." So speaks the narrator, thirty years after the events described, but it is also Brautigan speaking. Brautigan is the Fantasist, regretfully summing up his childhood and his America.

Ottenberg,1982

"Some Fun, Some Gloom"
Eve Ottenberg
The New York Times Book Review, 7 Nov. 1982, Sec. 7, pp. 13, 47.
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With anomie now well ensconsed as one of the recent crazes in fiction, one of the few diversions left to a hedonistic reader is keeping track of which novelists are holding their own and which are diving like lemmings into the new streams of gloom. William Kotzwinkle, never one to go with the crowd, has distanced himself even farther from it with his delightful and funny Christmas at Fontaine's. Richard Brautigan, on the other hand, has taken the plunge. The results, in both cases, are instructive: For Mr. Brautigan life seems to be a pointless mess, while for Mr. Kotzwinkle a lot of other things too. The literary imagination displayed in their latest books is limited or freed accordingly.

Though Christmas at Fontaine's is devoid of glum intentions, Mr. Kotzwinkle's characters certainly have their woes. Herbert Muhlstock, the wretchedly compulsive manager of the toy department in Fontaine's department store, has enough nervous tics for a roomful of clocks; Louis Fontaine, the cigar-chomping, limousine-riding store owner who fires at least five employees a day, is being hounded by the Internal Revenue Service; Santa Claus, a skinny hobo stifled by his immense outfit, has to listen to children who want machine guns for Christmas to protect their toys from their siblings; Winifred Ingram, who working at Fontaine's coffee counter, has so much caffeine in her system she can't think straight; Dann Sardos, the maniacal window decorator, succombs to a fit of indecision over his chef-d'oeuvre, the ultimate window display; and Chester Locke, the security guard, is being driven to lunacy by an elusive presence that haunts the store at night.

But despite their sundry afflictions, all of these characters have a sense of humor. More important, the novel treats them humorously without demeaning them. They are not looked down on, their flaws are not a source of authorial revulsion, they are not condescended to because of their silliness. This rare evenhandedness comes in part from the fact that the novel is a Christmas fable with a fairly happy ending; but more fundamentally it reflects the geniality, the true open-heartedness that permeates the tale.

There is refreshing harmony here. Christmas at Fontaine's presents a vision of Manhattan as a magical place—magical because strangers from all walks of life cross paths, occasionally talk to each other, and now and then are even kind to each other. They are kind in the way the storyteller is kind, whether looking into Louis Fontaine's plush limousine, or into the seedy, transient hotel where Santa sleeps. Wherever Mr. Kotswinkle looks, he manages to find something zany and, at the same time, touching.

The complaint that could be made is that Christmas at Fontaine's drags a bit in the middle, with its excursions into the wacky inner life of Mad Aggie, a local shopping bag lady. Her nuttiness, unfortunately, begins to jar with everyone else's crisply frazzled sanity. This slight defect, however, does allow Mr. Kotzwinkle to expatiate on his cherished terrain—the bizarrely multifarious secret life of Manhattan. By the end, Aggie's berserk but often too lengthy hallucinations seem a small obstacle to the liveliness and wit of this very good-natured novel.

So The Wind Won't Blow It All Away

So The Wind Won't Blow It All Away presents a rather different state of human affairs. Grim, caustic, overly sentimental, peppered with incomprehensibly mixed metaphors, this novel seems determined to deprive its characters of any shred of well-being. Never exactly sunny to begin with, Mr. Brautigan has nonetheless nearly found his way out of the literary incoherence of the 1960's and landed in the middle of the current sullen trend. The results are not happy. So The Wind Won't Blow It All Away, though better than Mr. Brautigan's previous novels, aims so deliberately at putting the reader in a funk that by page five it has most definitely succeeded.

This rather elliptical, first-person memoir of an anonymous boy raised in poverty, unloved but tolerated by his welfare mother, shows the two of them shuffling from one depressing town to another in the Pacific Northwest circa 1947. There is a familiar assortment of local eccentrics: the old pensioner who lives in a waterside shack made of packing crates; the alcholic guard of a sawmill, similarly housed in a shack in the middle of nowhere; the husband and wife who drive up to a pond every night, unload their furniture from their pickup truck, set up their dining room by the water's edge and pass the night fishing. These people have little apparent relation to each other except that the boy knows them. He is obsessed with death, and a great deal of the novel is taken up with his morose thanatopis. As a result, there is not sufficient space to develop the minor characters and the reason why they do appear is never made clear.

The style is disconnected, chaotic, redolent of alienation. Everyone in the book has an acute case of the late 20th-century blues. The boy's mother, inexplicably terrified of the gas stove in her kitchen, passes night after night whispering, "Gas, gas, gas." The old pensioner has built a dock and a boat but for some reason never uses them. A gas station attendent, selling worms for fishing on the side, appears to have no other life. Meanwhile, the narrator engages in some rather particular and disjointed humor, familiar from the avant-garde novels of a decade or so ago: "My mother and my sisters won't be mentioned again because they are not really part of this story. That of course is a lie. They will be mentioned later on. Don't know why I just told this lie." Neither does the reader, which leads inevitably to the thought that perhaps it should have been deleted. This happens with distressing frequency throughout the book; but even so, less frequently than in Mr. Brautigan's previous novels.

Ultimately, it turns out that there really is a cause for this novel's intensely disaffected tone. So The Wind Won't Blow It All Away does not merely meander from memory to memory, no matter how much it seems to; it has a climax, a horrible event that, retrospectively, accounts for the flat shell-shocked meaninglessness that precedes it. And if this well rendered, penultimate scene marks the direction in which Mr. Brautigan's fiction is going, then there is something to look forward to. As it is, I could not help thinking that the end is really the beginning, and the beginning is not there at all.

Ronald,1983

"So the Wind Won't Blow It All Away"
Ann Ronald
Western America Literature, Aug. 1983, pp. 164-165
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As soon as I start to translate a Richard Brautigan novel into everyday prose, its words dissolve. When I try to pin down his imagery, "so the wind won't blow it all away" it eludes me, "dust . . . American . . . dust." Like the fabled trout of his best-known work, sliding upstream just out of an angler's eager cast, the language of So the Wind Won't Blow It All Away floats transparently between Brautigan's imagination and mine.

Brautigan's narrator describes his task in an apparently straightforward manner. "As I sit here on August 1st, 1979," he explains, "my ear is pressed up against the past as if to the wall of a house that no longer exists." His goal is to invade that house of the imagination, to recreate the summer of 1947 when he was twelve years old and "the days of my childhood were running out, and every step I took was a step that brought me nearer to that February 17th 1948, orchard where my childhood would fall apart just like some old Roman ruins of a childhood." Carefully, then, "like peeling an onion into a smaller and smaller circle with tears growing in my eyes until the onion is no more, all peeled away and I stop crying," Brautigan's narrator unwinds his tragic past.

First his layered prose introduces an entire population of young and old eccentrics. The narrator becomes, in turn, the little boy who rises at dawn to watch early morning rituals at a funeral parlor next door, the grade-schooler who loses two playmates to death, and the twelve-year-old who is fascinated by hamburgers and guns. His companions, equally grotesque, range from the night watchman at a nearby sawmill, with his "thin beer-brittle physique," to an old man who carves docks and, when eating, dashes "stew down his beard like lava coming from a volcano." My favorites, though, are the middle-aged couple who fish an isolated pond. From their truck they unload a couch, stuffed chair, rocking chair, end tables, and floor lamps, setting up every night an entire living room out-of-doors. The boy is fascinated by the display; such pseudo-domesticity, in fact, is the closest thing to home in the entire novel.

Most of the time the boy wanders alone from encounter to encounter, seeking some friends and avoiding others, luring the reader into a nostalgic yet nightmarish past. "I can hear the sound of redwing blackbirds and the wind blowing hard against the cattails," the narrator recalls. "They rustle in the wind like ghost swords in battle and there is the steady lapping of the pond at the shore's edge, which I belong to with my imagination." My imagination meets the narrator, his boyhood self, and the 1940s' grotesques like the middle-aged fishermen at the shore's edge too. There I try to reconstruct Brautigan's world without making the implicit so explicit that the tragi-comic evocation is destroyed.

So I choose not to explain the February day in 1948 when a childhood disintegrated. To learn about that event, "so the wind won't blow it all away," the reader must approach the rainswept apple orchard on his own. Suffice it to say that all our laughter turns to tears when baseball, Mom, apple pie, and Miss American Pie disappear into the American Gothic of Richard Brautigan's mind.

Sage,1983

"Gone Fishing Again"
Lorna Sage
The Observer, 17 Apr. 1983, p. 32.
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The contemporary muse is notorious for playing around, so it is perhaps not entirely shocking that she seems to have supplied Richard Brautigan with the same plot for his "new" novel that she produced for Kurt Vonnegut's a very short time ago. I mean the one about the narrator who shot someone by accident when he was 12 and has been trying to rewrite destiny ever since. It's not a case of jokey plagiarism either—more a matter of a limited mythic repertoire. This particular plot-item is called something like The End of American Innocence, and I suppose the real wonder is that the shamless muse hasn't thrust the same gun into the hands of other ironical conscripts as well. Joseph Heller, say . . .

Doubtless she'll get around to it. Meanwhile, to establish the genre, this is Brautigan's guilty narrator in So the Wind Won't Blow It All Away:

"Too bad I couldn't grab the bullet out the air and put it back into the .22 rifle barrel and have it spiral itself back down the barrel. . . ."

And this is Vonnegut's in Deadeye Dick:

"I could let down the hammer gently, without firing the cartridge. And then I could withdraw the bolt . . . but I squeezed the trigger instead."

The strategy is to announce the crime at the beginning (original sin), and then to try to salvage a shadowy "freedom"—and an even more dubious "innocence"—out of the predestined mess, despite all.

Here, Brautigan's distinctive tone takes him off in his own direction, into the kind of exiguous lyricism that established him (with Trout Fishing in America) as the first of the Hippies—or was it the last of the Beats? His evocation of his narrator's 1940s boyhood ("My ear pressed up against the past as if to the wall of a house that no longer exists") is stubbornly idyllic; long, aimless days spent fishing, scavenging for beer bottles, or listening to the various derelict grown-ups who share something of children's wise idleness. His central image is a fish-crazy couple who transport their entire living room (sofa, armchairs, family photos) to the bank of the pond every summer evening, and play house there like benevolent, protective giants.

It's against this "fairy tale" tableau that he sets the story of his young hero's horrible mistake, the fatal shooting. Playing with guns is, he implies, what we all know already about America, what his narrator can never forget. Its other side, nearly lost to memory, is this land of imaginative free enterprise, peopled with harmless eccentrics, way of history's beaten track.