Though he did occasionally fall. His metaphors can be widely off the mark, some too gnomic to comprehend. Where the brutally brief length of ‘The Scarlatti Tilt’ makes it one of the best flash fictions ever written, other pieces feel boil-in-the-bag, or half-formed, more musings than anything else. A feminist Brautigan was not – women often occupy wistful sexual and aesthetic space only in the tales, are expected to get on board with men’s desires, be compliant when a character wants to get laid. He does better with old ladies and daughters, where the complicated business of sex is moot. Here there are acute character studies and even heroines. Possibly the wisest person in the entire collection is the little girl in ‘A Short History of Religion in California’, who rejects the piece of cake given to her by a Christian in the campsite where she is staying with her father. ‘I’ve already had breakfast’, she explains. She’s previously expressed a desire to be a deer, to have antlers and hooves, which, in the scheme of the story, makes perfect metaphysical sense.

If you think things work a certain way, think again, Brautigan’s stories encourage, and quite rapidly the reader does forget the normal arrangements. The shifting perspectives and playful reversals, the activation of inanimate objects, the sudden sentience of things we believe to be unthinking, the unusual possibilities of life, in the end might provide some consolation for the fact of Brautigan’s tragic death and the lessening of interest in his work over the years. ‘Perhaps the words remember me’, he writes in ‘Banners of My Own Choosing’, as if there is, or could be, a world where the letters and sentences produced by an author are capable of nostalgia, even affection. I love this idea.

Certainly the words in Revenge do justice to the writer. Perhaps because I first read him when young and those associations remain, when I go back to Brautigan I always half expect the naïve and imperfect aspects to slightly disappoint. I’m never disappointed. Those same virtuoso characteristics of limitless creativity, the lambent glower of the old country and the iconoclastic energy of the period, shine through. It still rains evocatively over the woods and valleys of the Pacific Northwest. The quotidian and the impossible walk hand in hand. There’s exceptional originality and levity to the phrase making. I’m reminded of the fundamental qualities I sought out in literature, connections that were so vital at the time, and still resonate now.

Sarah Hall
April 2014

Revenge of the Lawn