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Jean Kane's review of 'So the Wind Won't Blow It All Away'
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Naive Tone Perfect for Brautigan Novel

by Jean Kane?

After changes upon changes, Richard Brautigan is more or less the same. The author who first gained prominence as a counterculture voice in 1967 (Trout Fishing in America) now often abandons contemporary settings in order to explore genres such as the mystery and the western, but his prose still reads like whimsy incarnate.

If So the Wind Won't Blow it All Away is any sort of definitive authorial statement, the present is much too bleak for such fragile musings. The novelette is almost entirely a flashback to the narrator's childhood, during and after World War II. "In those days," says the adult, "people made their own imagination, like home cooking."

Whitey, the narrator, remembers these years fondly, in spite of the hardship they engendered. His family, subsisting on welfare, was perpetually en route to still shabbier quarters, and his mother, a single parent, slid into an emotional decline that paralleled her financial one. She looms like a shadow in Whitey's recollections. His sisters are barely mentioned.

Brautigan's sensibilities fit those of a child remarkably well. His characteristic elevation of small details to the status of major revelations suits a naive consciousness, and his stylistic reliance on non sequitur and odd juxtaposition rarely sounds contrived. Even Brautigan's simple syntax helps establish the narrative voice of an earnest, withdrawn boy.

Whitey enjoyed the company of adults. He was initially fascinated with an alcoholic saw-mill guard who dispensed his refundable beer bottles among the local children, and later, with an old man who lived in a packing-crate house at edge of a pond.

His keenest interest was reserved, however, for a middle-aged couple who visited the opposite side of the pond. There, they frequently set up a living room — complete with couch, tables, lamps and family portraits — in order to fish, eat and sit.

The theme of Whitey's other obsession is death. He first realized his own mortality when he was 5, as he watched a child-sized casket being borne from the mortuary his family then resided above. This morbid concern continued for several years. Whitey never saw a child die, but witnessed loss through the disappearance of toys from once-littered lawns and porches.

Both themes foreshadow the climactic event of Whitey's life, the death that marked the end of his childhood. Symbolically, this event also serves to close America's age of innocence. The adults Whitey knew were materially poor, but nonetheless content with simple pleasures. Impoverished dwellings drew them outside, and tedium forced them to turn to their inner lives for excitement.

This romantic vision of the past becomes problematic only when Brautigan hammers home generalities, instead of letting the story speak for itself. For instance, Whitey stands at the pond conjuring the living room, which "looked like a fairy tale functioning happily in the post-World War II gothic of America before television crippled the imagination of America and people turned indoors and away from living out their own fantasies with dignity."

As a child's tale, "Wind" is convincing and passably wrought; when it must support ham-handled social commentary, the parable breaks down.

One could reasonably argue that even watching television is an improvement over carting a living room out to a pond for fun — at least modern folk escape the rain. And the myth of the happy poor has become so trite that only a president may resort to it with impunity.

But the moralizing does not intrude the narrative frequently, and Whitey's child-consciousness takes care of the rest: Whimsy does not sit easily in adult mouths. Like Brautigan, it is an acquired taste.


Indianapolis City Star?
September 19, 1982: F4



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