where have you gone, richard brautigan?

FICTIONafterword by kevin berger

The Secrers ofFictionWdHilffifl F,f&Vf; Y#T"$ ##NN, ffi$flF{ARS MR&UTIGAN?

THRE,E YEARS BEFORE MYfather died in 1994, he discov-ered Richard Brautigan. Hewas looking for farnily photo-graphs in the attic and cameacross a box of worn p:rper-backs; Brautiga.n's Trout F ishingin America was lying on top.He started reading it becrusehe thought it was about, well,trout fishing in Americ:r.

But Dad quickly discoveredthat the book was not aboutspinning rods and iigginglures. It was a picares<1ue

novel about an odilly serene

narr2rtor drifting through San

Francisco's bohernian bars andhotels in the early '60s, recalling his lonely North-western childhood, failed fishing trips arouncl thecountry, and r:rndom encounters with an ageless

sage named Trout Fishing in America.Dad was so enchanted by the comic 1967 novel

that he spent a week reading the rest of Brautigan'sslirr, wistful books, including In Waterrnelon Sugarnd The Abortion. He wasn'r sure whar drew himto the novels; he guessed they were about the com-mercialization of America. The "bastards and theirmalls" was how he put it. But above all, he said,they were "surreal, really weird. Like poems." HadI read themi Were they well knownl

Yes, I had read them; yes, they were very wellknown. Initially released with little promotion,Brautigan's novels soared in popularity on a streetbuzz that American literature had seldom seen. Inthe late '60s and '70s, they were required reading notin classrooms but in the Haight, Greenwich Village,and every other epicenter of cultural electricity.

Often called the "last of the beats," Brautiganat his best transcended the self-righteousness ofhis forebears and penned scenes that were tendeqfunny, and sad at the same time. Dad's idea of a

great book was The World Rushed 12, an epistolaryhistory of the California gold rush, so I cherishthe image of him in his den, reading about thepoor kid in Trout Fishing who couldn't work onhis family's farm because he was "ruptured," andso "stayed home and became a Kool-Aid wino."

But Dad's Brautigan encounter is also a sad

reminder that contemporary novels no longer seem

like personal treasures, secrets that bind us to our

SAN FRANCISCO

friends and times. Regardless of how Brautigantnovels welther posterity-and some critics file themalongside albums by the Strawberry Alarm Clock-they represent the end of the line for a certain ebul-lience in American fiction, days when it thrivedat the heart of our culture. The past two decadeshave brought us countless novels that illuminatethis centuryt wrning days with exceptional graceand force. Yet they exist at the margins of culture,barely subsisting on a shrinking supply of avidreaders. Even Thomas Pynchon's brilliant Mason& Dixon, released in 1997, raised little more rhana cultural murmur-a far cry from the '70s, whenthe author of Gtuuity's Rainbow was widely reveredas a titan of American letters.

The problem begins with today's sheer numberof good writers. With so many fictional voices,literary culture has become what contemporarynovelist Richarcl Powers calls "a bathtub with thefhucet open. Eventually the tub has to overflow.And eventually the sense that literature is a cen-trifugal force that holds culture together is goingto be replaced by the notion that it's a force pullingculture into a diversity it will nor survive."

Yet that force is fueled by more than a surfeitof writers. Fiction that requires time and thoughtis trampled in the Informarion Age, a multimediamarketplace of books, movies, and music designedto entertain us as quickly as wisecracks. Becausea few cultural barons now own everything, theydemand instant profits to keep their stock pricesrising. They cram the shelves of popular cukurewith titillating products, taunting us to keep upwith the output. And the scariest thing of all is

that we are: Eyes Wide Shut, Ally McBeal, LilithFair, Mark Morris, Reat, Salon.com, the Knicksversus the Spurs-we consume them all withoutpause or discrimination. Nothing is special anymore.

Which only increases the need for novels toarrive on the words of our friends. Outside theentertainment machine, we can settle into the silentspaces of consciousness, the only place to makesense of the chaotic world. Brautigan, who commit-ted suicide in 1984, seemed to reach out ro myfather from a different era. He granted Dad a weekof solitary pleasure, a respite from the inescapablenews that he had cancer. When Dad told me aboutTtout Fishing in America, how it had puzzled andpleased him, I knew I would always save a place inthis maddening life for the quiet, unending streamof fiction. $-

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