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Betsy Kline's review of 'The Tokyo-Montana Express'
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Express Takes Readers on Journey That Rambles Through Author's Mind

by Betsy Kline?

Gentle, silly and maddeningly repetitive are just some of the adjectives that have been used to describe Richard Brautigan's novels. Thank goodness some things never change.

Although the characters and situations may differ, the same world shines through: a world that is perpetually optimistic but progressively confused. As always, it is Brautigan as author-narrator who stands at our side as the laid-back tour guide through the zaniness and sadness.

Since 1967 and the publication of his second novel, Trout Fishing in America, Brautigan has treated his readers and cult fans to healthy doses of optimism, curiosity and matter-of-fact honesty. He once said in an interview that he wrote poetry for many years just so he could learn to write a sentence. Then he made his sentence his trademark: blank-faced statements of fact that said more about his perception of the fact than the fact itself.

Reviewers delighted in referring to his "spaced imagination," which put the most commonplace occurrences in the light of discoveries that touched the soul. Each sentence seemed to have an unspoken "oh wow" dangling at the end. This quality was intoxicating for the reader, because it enabled him or her to share in the moment of discovery with the author, whether the discovery was a sparkling mountain stream or a gigantic potato carved in stone.

Brautigan's world revolves around the beauty and calm of nature. In Trout Fishing in America, he seeks his American ideal, the perfect trout stream, which has been polluted, degraded, chopped in sections and sold by the foot in secondhand shops. In Watermelon Sugar is a generous slice of life composed of sweet, insubstantial watermelon sugar.

On the whole, the plots of Brautigan's novels are not memorable, if indeed that exist in some cases. But it is difficult to forget the human portraits the author strews along the rambling, zigzag path of life. The pathetic but valiant characters in The Abortion: An Historical Romance 1966 float back to memory. Where else but in Brautigan's gentle imagination could a 24-hour-a-day library exist for the sole purpose of welcoming to its shelves the scribblings and outpourings of anybody who knocks at its door?

Brautigan's latest novel, The Tokyo-Montana Express, has the barest of plots, if it can be called that. Because the authors spends most of his time at home in Livingston, Montana or in Tokyo, he has chosen to collect vignettes of his experiences and impressions of life at "the stops" in between on his imaginary Tokyo-Montana railroad, which, as it happens, crisscrosses the far corners of the United States but always terminates in the streets of Tokyo.

Strung together, these short glimpses of Brautigan are not meant to compose a discernible story line, other than illustrating that its author-narrator is constantly on the move. Some of the chapters don't even fill a page. (Brautigan is the only writer I can think of, except Henry Fielding?, who can make a long list of chapter headings fun reading.)

The chapters in The Tokyo-Montana Express are pensive moments shared with the reader. The hilarity of his other books appears here but in a muted, wistful way. The craziness of "What Are You Going to Do With 390 Photographs of Christmas Trees??" mellows to a sad nostalgia as the narrator and a friend rush about San Francisco armed with cameras, snapping pictures of discarded Christmas trees, their beauty used up, tossed out when the celebration is over and left to be run over on curbs and empty lots. The emphasis shifts unnoticeably from the insane notion of photographing dead trees to the fickle wastefulness of the human race.

"The Irrevocable Sadness of Her Thank You?" grasps the remnants of a sweet memory of an anonymous vision of beauty and a slight act of thoughtfulness that returns to haunt the author. Most of the chapters in this book deal with wistful looks backward: a friend not made, a gesture remembered, an action planned and abandoned.

Brautigan's descriptions of things and places have a marvelous honesty about them, strings of words that have no right being in the same sentence, but, nonetheless come together humorously and naturally to describe a simple scene. There are the inescapable images of Brautigan's works: fish, water, graveyards and snow. When you think about it, these are inescapable commonplaces for someone who chooses to make his home in the Yellowstone National Park.

Some episodes elude the reader and seem out of place in the book, even as loosely structured as The Tokyo-Montana Express is.

Brautigan's prose is like a fishing expedition. Bobbing amid the vignettes of his tranquil life are some prize catches of life frozen in time. But luck and skill play a part in landing these prizes, and the rest is word tease and disappointment. The reader ends the expedition feeling content but unlucky: happy for the catches and wondering wistfully about the ones that got away.


Kansas City Star?
December 21, 1980: 1,12D



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