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Timothy A. Hunter's review of 'So the Wind Won't Blow It All Away'
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Brautigan's Latest: 'Gentle, Brief, Slippery': A Review of So the Wind Won't Blow It All Away

by Timothy A. Hunter?

Some authors write novels that are challenging, difficult, maybe even painful to read. Yet, when you finish their books, their characters, images and ideas linger in your mind for days, weeks, or months.

Other writers, like Richard Brautigan, master of the one-sitting novel, turn out books that require no effort to read, but leave less impact on your consciousness than your neighbor's latest batch of vacation slides.

It's been 20 minutes since I put down Brautigan's latest, and I can hardly remember a thing about it, except that the hour I spent reading it was not unpleasant.

Wait a minute. If I really concentrate, a few of Brautigan's images creep into my mind like hazy childhood memories. I can see a young boy searching for the cosmic essence of hamburgers. I see the boy weeping in a tree after the nicest kid in the neighborhood has suddenly died. I see the boy watching funerals out his window the way other kids watch television.

Television! That's it, the book takes place in the late 1940s, "before television crippled the imagination of America and turned people indoors and away from living out their own fantasies with dignity."

I see the post-war, pre-tube lad watching a strange, fat, middle-class couple set up their living room furniture by a pond. They make themselves comfy and cosy, like present-day fat, middle-class couples who sit in living rooms and watch...

I see the boy befriend a number of hermits: one who sells worms in a gas station, one who lives in a packing-crate shack near the pond, one who guards a sawmill. I see the boy accidentally kill someone with his .22 rifle.

Now, if I concentrate even harder (and — let's be honest — return to the text), I can glean specific lines from the book.

Some, like this one, are sweet: "The sun turned boring in the middle of the afternoon, as it so often does for children..."

Some, like this one, are playful: "I'm just waiting and this is as good a way to wait as any other way to wait because waiting's all the same anywait."

Some, like this one never end: "I took all my notes and interviews and assorted documents down to the river that flowed by the new town we were exiled to and burned them in a picnic stove that was beside a very sad little Oregon zoo that barely had any animals and they were all wet because it was raining again as was the fate of that land."

Some, like this one are uninspired: "That cricket sounded so loud and so good that he could have been a star in a Walt Disney movie."

Yes, the novel is starting to come back. Little tidbits of whimsy, tiny drops of sadness, sentimental shadows, children who don't watch TV, children who won't grow up — these are the modest gifts So the Wind Won't Blow It All Away has to offer.

Now at this juncture I remember much more about this novel than I do about the other Brautigan books I've read and assuredly, though evanescently, enjoyed. About The Hawkline Monster: A Gothic Western I recall something vaguely erotic and nebulously monstrous. About Willard and His Bowling Trophies: A Perverse Mystery I dimly recall some quirky brotherly shenanigans. About Sombrero Fallout: A Japanese Novel I remember nothing.

So it goes with Brautigan. His new novel is gentle, brief and slippery. There are, to say the least, less pleasurable ways to spend an hour.

But I doubt I'll remember much about it in a month, or in a week, or tomorrow.


Baltimore Sun?
September 5, 1982: D5



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