briandice 's review for:

Revenge of the Lawn: Stories 1962-1970 by Richard Brautigan

3.0

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A compilation of works that are more flash fiction than short stories, Brautigan's unique voice is displayed in 62 pieces set in San Francisco and the Pacific Northwest. Too many of the stories feel like the first brush strokes of a bigger work - abandoned and stacked like the detritus of a forgotten childhood an attic to be discovered and published 50 years later. Here's what I mean: one of the stories, "The Gathering of a Californian", is four paragraphs long - 1/2 of page - and it reads like the opening words of a Great American Novel. Here's the first paragraph:

Like most Californians, I come from sompelace else and was gathered to the purpose of California like a metal-eating flower gathers the sunshine, the rain, and then to the freeway beckons its petals and lets the cars drive in, millions of cars into but a single flower, the scent choked with congestion and room for millions more.

150 words later, it ends. It's not by accident that my favorite pieces from the collection are stories that stretch to several pages. Were some of these just ideas that Brautigan had for future longer works - like Woody Allen's stack of matchbook covers with ideas for movies - or were they always intended to exist as they are?

Fans of Barthelme and Keret will find a lot to love in any Brautigan work, and those longer stories here (the title story and "The Post Offices of Eastern Oregon" are my favorites) are brethren to those authors' works. My three star rating of this collection isn't a reflection on the author's craft as it is my reaction to the jarring nature of too many stories ended before I had the chance to suck the marrow from them.