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cryo_guy 's review for:
Revenge of the Lawn
by Richard Brautigan
“Like some kind of strange vacuum cleaner I tried to console him. I recited the same old litanies that you say to people when you try to help their broken hearts, but words can't help at all.
It's just the sound of another human voice that makes the only difference. There's nothing you're ever going to say that's going to make anybody happy when they're feeling shitty about losing somebody
they love.”
*
Hello hello!
This is another book I've been meaning to read for a while now. I'm happy to report that I am actually starting to make some headway through books of this category. Some headway. This one I believe I picked up as a used book at one of my favorite used book stores in Astoria. It doesn't have a particularly attractive cover or anything, but it is humorous in its own right. I believe I once read something about Brautigan demanding that the covers of his books have pictures of his girlfriends or somesuch like that. I don't mean to judge the guy too harshly, but as you know that is exactly what must be done! Anyway, we'll get to that. The whole reason I bought this book was because I had happened upon one of its short stories called “I Was Trying to Describe You to Somebody” on the interwebs. Or maybe a friend had shared it to me. I really liked it and since my Nana grew up in Tacoma, I liked it for more than just its use of metaphor and the prose but also because it referenced introducing electricity to the rural parts of Tacoma. That would have been when my Nana's father was growing up and as it happens he worked for one of the small electricity companies that operated in the area. It was a nice synthesis of elements I enjoyed in one short story and it has a romantic bent that I'm not opposed to.
Overall, I wasn't terribly impressed. Brautigan definitely has a coherent and charming authorial voice, but that's about as far as it goes. It's original but hard to access in its aloofness. Part of this is a result of the length of his short stories which are almost what I've heard called “micro stories” which is a term you either hate because it's brutally superfluous or pedantically specific. Lydia Davis does em like this. But Brautigan was doing this really early and I think that's significant in some way. I'm not suggesting he originated the idea, but this work is certainly uniform in its commitment to very short short stories, all having a tone of relatively relaxed vignettes in Brautigan's life-poor childhood in Tacoma, adolescence-young adulthood in California, adulthood in California, and various topics and times in between. There's some war stuff, some nature stuff, some meta stuff. Vonnegut does a much bettter job of the tongue in cheek meta stuff when Vonnegut strolls onto the stage in the middle of one of his books but maybe he had a few years to refine a newer technique.
I read something else about how Brautigan is placed between the Beat Generation and the 60s free love movement. And that's a pretty good way to describe his writing. Sometimes his age shows, other times not so much. The most annoying thing about him might have been the flippant way his male characters treat women, often there's emphasis on the young female form. Eh I get it, but it's a little boring if accurate. There's a whole story about him showing up at two different ex-lover's houses in the middle of the night to demand a cup of coffee. His insistence about the coffee makes it seem like he's not hoping for an amorous encounter but then the way the women are compromised, one has just taken a shower and is in a towel, and described suggests that an amorous encounter is not out of the question or rather not unwelcome by our beloved protagonist demanding coffee (but he does it in this friendly aloof way! It's totally fine really!). In some brief articles I read about Brautigan only one mentioned his attitude toward women with a negative eye, others labeled him a feminist. So here's a brief compilation and three random articles that no doubt don't cover the issue well enough: He was odd and aloof and like to test his friendships (men and women) having an intense desire to be loved. In due course of this testing he would be as cold or warm, in turns, and show up in the middle of the night (cf. The story I just mentioned). But maybe he had a good heart? Who knows. My point here is not particularly to judge the guy, least of all because of the decades he's writing from, but just to point out that reading his story there was definitely an unpleasant element of sexualizing the female form. But even this is something that is not particularly uncommon...Well. It's not like all the stories are occupied with sexual objectification. Many of them are a fairly interesting look at life from the 40s-60s on the west coast. And Brautigan, while not being masterful or anything is enjoyable enough. The other part of it that I liked that I haven't discussed much was just the general tone of the stories. Wit and melancholy.
Alrighty, I think I've described this well enough for people looking for recs. I once thought I'd try to read a few of Brautigan's works because he seemed like a nice compromise between someone like Bukowski or an actual Beat Generation author but I'm less enthusiastic than I was. I'm not sure I will get to the others any time soon. I don't feel any compulsion to. I really do like “I Was Trying to Describe You to Somebody” though.
It's just the sound of another human voice that makes the only difference. There's nothing you're ever going to say that's going to make anybody happy when they're feeling shitty about losing somebody
they love.”
*
Hello hello!
This is another book I've been meaning to read for a while now. I'm happy to report that I am actually starting to make some headway through books of this category. Some headway. This one I believe I picked up as a used book at one of my favorite used book stores in Astoria. It doesn't have a particularly attractive cover or anything, but it is humorous in its own right. I believe I once read something about Brautigan demanding that the covers of his books have pictures of his girlfriends or somesuch like that. I don't mean to judge the guy too harshly, but as you know that is exactly what must be done! Anyway, we'll get to that. The whole reason I bought this book was because I had happened upon one of its short stories called “I Was Trying to Describe You to Somebody” on the interwebs. Or maybe a friend had shared it to me. I really liked it and since my Nana grew up in Tacoma, I liked it for more than just its use of metaphor and the prose but also because it referenced introducing electricity to the rural parts of Tacoma. That would have been when my Nana's father was growing up and as it happens he worked for one of the small electricity companies that operated in the area. It was a nice synthesis of elements I enjoyed in one short story and it has a romantic bent that I'm not opposed to.
Overall, I wasn't terribly impressed. Brautigan definitely has a coherent and charming authorial voice, but that's about as far as it goes. It's original but hard to access in its aloofness. Part of this is a result of the length of his short stories which are almost what I've heard called “micro stories” which is a term you either hate because it's brutally superfluous or pedantically specific. Lydia Davis does em like this. But Brautigan was doing this really early and I think that's significant in some way. I'm not suggesting he originated the idea, but this work is certainly uniform in its commitment to very short short stories, all having a tone of relatively relaxed vignettes in Brautigan's life-poor childhood in Tacoma, adolescence-young adulthood in California, adulthood in California, and various topics and times in between. There's some war stuff, some nature stuff, some meta stuff. Vonnegut does a much bettter job of the tongue in cheek meta stuff when Vonnegut strolls onto the stage in the middle of one of his books but maybe he had a few years to refine a newer technique.
I read something else about how Brautigan is placed between the Beat Generation and the 60s free love movement. And that's a pretty good way to describe his writing. Sometimes his age shows, other times not so much. The most annoying thing about him might have been the flippant way his male characters treat women, often there's emphasis on the young female form. Eh I get it, but it's a little boring if accurate. There's a whole story about him showing up at two different ex-lover's houses in the middle of the night to demand a cup of coffee. His insistence about the coffee makes it seem like he's not hoping for an amorous encounter but then the way the women are compromised, one has just taken a shower and is in a towel, and described suggests that an amorous encounter is not out of the question or rather not unwelcome by our beloved protagonist demanding coffee (but he does it in this friendly aloof way! It's totally fine really!). In some brief articles I read about Brautigan only one mentioned his attitude toward women with a negative eye, others labeled him a feminist. So here's a brief compilation and three random articles that no doubt don't cover the issue well enough: He was odd and aloof and like to test his friendships (men and women) having an intense desire to be loved. In due course of this testing he would be as cold or warm, in turns, and show up in the middle of the night (cf. The story I just mentioned). But maybe he had a good heart? Who knows. My point here is not particularly to judge the guy, least of all because of the decades he's writing from, but just to point out that reading his story there was definitely an unpleasant element of sexualizing the female form. But even this is something that is not particularly uncommon...Well. It's not like all the stories are occupied with sexual objectification. Many of them are a fairly interesting look at life from the 40s-60s on the west coast. And Brautigan, while not being masterful or anything is enjoyable enough. The other part of it that I liked that I haven't discussed much was just the general tone of the stories. Wit and melancholy.
Alrighty, I think I've described this well enough for people looking for recs. I once thought I'd try to read a few of Brautigan's works because he seemed like a nice compromise between someone like Bukowski or an actual Beat Generation author but I'm less enthusiastic than I was. I'm not sure I will get to the others any time soon. I don't feel any compulsion to. I really do like “I Was Trying to Describe You to Somebody” though.