Rodent Bowling in Cambodia

Richard Brautigan’s Trout Fishing in America is a poetic novel as all over the place as all the trout all over America (if that makes sense, if not it’s just really out there---in a good way). There is no real linear plot line, instead it is filled with cleaver, insiteful, and just plain weird vignettes about anything and everything from winos, to fishermen, to sixth graders to a pimp.

Brautigan’s style sound like poetry being shredded and then clumped together into paragraphs, similarly to the way a butcher would make ground beef. His prose is simple yet descriptive; his sentences: terse and to the point. The stories are often funny in an ironic sometimes sarcastic way, but they nearly always have the subtle wisdom of someone who has been around many blocks. In “Red Lip” Brautigan describes the inside of an opened outhouse “like a human face,” this “seemed to say, ‘The old guy who built me crapped in here 9,745 times and he’s dead now and I don’t want anyone else to touch me’” (Brautigan 7).

“The Hunchback Trout” does a good job of rounding up the many elements that make for an interesting Brautigan tale. The “story” begins with Brautigan comparing the creek where he frequently trout fishes to a collection of telephone booths 12x845. Brautigan’s stories often combine the real with the author’s own odd brand of fantastical descriptions. He relates his fishing to work and makes a note how he punches in “leaving his card above the clock” (Brautigan 56). The story is really funny as well, though it has an odd sort of humor.

In “Trout Fishing in America Terrorists,” Brautigan creates one of his funniest stories, about young people writing “Trout Fishing in America” on the backs of first graders. The story is the most “normal,” because of its realistic plot and inclusion of relatable dialogue. In the story the sixth graders write on the backs of all the sixth graders and then are sent to the principle who tells them to cease and desist. The story could be metaphoric of older boys asserting their influence on younger children and the submissive nature of young kids. The story is well written and insightful so that when you are done all you can do is laugh and nod your head in agreement.

Trout Fishing in America is so poetic that it only makes sense to follow one of Brautigan’s novels with one of Brautigan’s collections of poetry. The poetry in The Pill Verses the Springhill Mine Disaster is just as one would expect, short, intelligent and often funny. In “The Beautiful Poem,” Brautigan manages to make a truly romantic beautiful poem from the slightly vulgar perspective of a sarcastic male saying, “looking down at [his] penis” makes him happy “knowing it has been inside [his lover] twice today” (Brautigan 4). Despite its crude shell the poem has a very sincere inside, a truly unique beautiful poem. Often his poems are short three line bits of wisdom as in “Widow’s Lament” where he states “Its not quite cold enough to go borrow some firewood from the neighbors,” which is very true and, due to it’s brevity, surprisingly funny (Brautigan 13).

Whether it is through is fiction or through his poetry, the writings of Richard Brautigan are a unique trip that is without comparison.