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by Michael Mason?
Richard Brautigan is a writer whose mannerisms irritate many people, but these readers would be well advised to try him again in this new collection. It may sound odd to say that an author has arrived at a vision which is harmonious with his way of writing after a sequence of no less than eight novels, but it is a claim which can be pressed surprisingly far for Brautigan and the Tokyo-Montana Express. Two of the potentially irritating features of this writer's procedure are that he is laconic (affectedly so, for those in the irritated camp), and interested (perhaps self-indulgently or coyly) in a certain restricted range of experience: low-key. private sensations and ephemeral, minor constituents of the world. The Tokyo-Montana Express takes these tendencies as far as they have ever gone with the author. The book is an assemblage of about 130 short, sometimes extremely short, fragments with no easily discerned continuity. The book amounts, however to a coherent meditation or investigation: united by a vision of things which is melancholy and alienated, and which is seeking an assuagement of these feelings.
The reader may soon sense that there is more design to the book's fragments than appears at first glance. Certain motifs establish themselves: animals, death, memories, dreams, snow and rain, food (and foodshops, restaurants, faeces, cooking), empty or vanished buildings (especially shops). One of the shortest pieces goes as follows:
Once upon a time there was a dwarf knight who only had fifty words to live in and they were so fleeting that he only had time to put on a suit of armour and ride swiftly on a black horse into a very well-lit wood where he vanished forever.
The knight only had fifty words to live in: and the fragment is exactly fifty words long (in quoting it I have corrected two distracting misprints, and there is at least one other in this section of the book; in such bare prose they are particularly jolting).
A different sort of consonance — this time involving Brautigan's typical brevity — is achieved in "Her Last Known Boyfriend a Canadian Airman?". It concerns a gifted and beautiful Chinese girl from San Francisco whose life effectively ceases with the death of her young boyfriend in the war. She takes a job washing dishes in a restaurant. And that is all. She has been washing dishes, never talking about the past, for thirty-four years. The abruptness of the telling is right. There is a refusal by the text to take up more than a page and a half, and there has been an equivalent refusal by the nature of things to grant the Chinese girl a full life. When her boyfriend died "she was a straight-A student" at college. People couldn't understand why she washed dishes, because "there were so many other things that she could have done".
Variations on this phrase, formulations about "things to do", sound throughout the Tokyo-Montana Express. The ruling theme of the collection is, indeed, that of human purpose or intentness upon an aim ("The Purpose" is the title of one fragment). There are many studies in obsession — for instance: an immigrant to America in 1851 (rather anachronistically described as a Czechoslovakian) who three times goes compulsively to California to seek gold, and dies there; a man staring at meat in a supermarket; a man fixated on his wife's infidelity; a woman who works all her life to open a restaurant (which fails) and a man who does the same with a bar; a man obsessed about Japanese women's feet, and another who takes thousands of photographs of beautiful women in Tokyo; a female taxi-driver in Montana who is fascinated by ice-ages, and a male one in Japan whose cab is full of pictures of carp.
If you are a taxi-driver, but really much more interested in ice-ages or carp, your ostensible purpose in life is at odds with your authentic one. Another group of fragments in The Tokyo-Montana Express concerns activity without true purpose: the Chinese dishwasher belongs with the bed-salesman who can't bring himself to look like "somebody who sincerely wants to sell beds", the butcher who similarly is more concerned about his cold hands than about selling meat, and the four pizza cooks having time off from Shakey's Pizza Parlour in Tokyo, about whom the author knows "one thing for certain ... they are not going to get a pizza." The cultural crossover, here is interesting. Being "sincere" about beds — that is, about what you are commercially associated with — is a variety of apparent purposefulness very readily locatable in America. But Brautigan more commonly makes the American end of his "express" the land of aimlessness. Choosing Montana as a main setting facilitates this, of course, especially when the contrasting community is Tokyo (and there are several vignettes of commuting Japanese). One of the touchstone pieces in the book — and one of many about having "nothing to do" — is "Montana Traffic Spell?". It simply describes how the traffic is held up in a small Montana town when the author's friend cannot decide which way he feels like going at the only traffic light.
Unlike Mainstreet in that town, the railway from Tokyo to Montana does not exist, or only as a route in the author's thought. "The 'I' in this book", he says. "is the voice of the stations along the tracks of the Tokyo-Montana express". What can we find to substitute for the usual purposes and routes in life since, as the book affirms in its melancholy, these are thwarted, or elusive, or at best survive as obsessions? Here that other typical note in Brautigan's manner, the narrow emphasis on certain kinds of experience, comes into play. There are three pieces in the collection which in a directly challenging fashion put the contrast between the small, transient and private, and what we normally regard as portentous and communally interesting. Food is a key notion in each of them. "Light on at the Tastee-Freez?" is about the author's preoccupation with a light he sees in a closed milk-bar (one of the book's deserted shops):
Sometimes when people are talking to me about very important things like President Carter or the Panama Canal and think I'm listening to them, I'm really thinking about the light on at the Tastee-Freez.
In a similar vein, "A Different Way of Looking at President Kennedy's Assassination((" brackets together, perhaps implying that they are equally upsetting, the cancellation of pancakes from a menu and the shooting of Kennedy. And one of the longest pieces of all, "((The Menu/1965?", is about the author's visit to San Quentin, and his greater interest in the menu for Death Row inmates than in penological issues:
I found the tamale loaf that was going to be served Thursday for dinner on Death Row far more exciting than the fact that ninety percent of the prison administrators in the country are against capital punishment.
This is the kind of thing which can bring on the allergic reaction to Brautigan, and there is nothing inadvertent in the provocation offered. But Brautigan is not, I think, glibly flourishing the idea of a shrugging, dismissive withdrawal from seriousness in such passages. Seriousness has its say in "The Menu/1965", when the author shows the Death Row bill-of-fare to a friend:
"It's so stark, so real," he said.
"It's like a poem. this menu alone condemns our society. To feed somebody this kind of food who is already effectively dead represents all the incongruity of the whole damn thing. It's senseless."
I looked down at the menu lying there on the table and for dinner Tuesday the men on Death Row were having
Spaghetti Soup
Beet and Onion Salad
Vinaigrette Dressing
Roast Leg of Pork
Brown Sauce
Ground Round Steak
Mashed Potatoes
Cream Style Corn
etc.
And this to become senseless?
How could beet and onion salad condemn our society? I always thought we were a little stronger than that. Was it possible for this menu to be a menace to California if it fell into the wrong hands?
"It's like a poem. this menu alone condemns our society. To feed somebody this kind of food who is already effectively dead represents all the incongruity of the whole damn thing. It's senseless."
I looked down at the menu lying there on the table and for dinner Tuesday the men on Death Row were having
Spaghetti Soup
Beet and Onion Salad
Vinaigrette Dressing
Roast Leg of Pork
Brown Sauce
Ground Round Steak
Mashed Potatoes
Cream Style Corn
etc.
And this to become senseless?
How could beet and onion salad condemn our society? I always thought we were a little stronger than that. Was it possible for this menu to be a menace to California if it fell into the wrong hands?
Menu as menace. Brautigan wins hands down this confrontation with seriousness. The apparent disproportions in his vision of things — pancakes and the assassination of Kennedy, Tastee-Freez, and Jimmy Carter — are there to suggest a correction to the opposite, more orthodox kind of disproportion in our attitudes. You can't only think of a beet and onion salad as a symbol of penological evil, and this goes for all the building-blocks of daily life. Moreover, Brautigan's mode is simply questioning, a proposed "different way of looking". After all, The Tokyo-Montana Express is full of obsessive people, and the author's high valuation of pancakes or Tastee-Freez (the name is flagrantly expressive of commercialism) may just be an internal version of what is seen from without in the man who stares at meat. Brautigan's description of the stations of his express is correct: "some confident, others still searching for their identities".
Times Literary Supplement
May 1, 1981: 483
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