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Larry McCaffery's review of 'The Tokyo-Montana Express'
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Keeping Track Of Life: A Review of The Tokyo-Montana Express

by Larry McCaffery

As is true of all his previous books. there is something galling about Richard Brautigan's latest work, "The Tokyo-Montana Express" — his flagrant, unembarrassed display of his own sensibilities, his refusal to elevate the consequential aspects of human experience above the trivial or ordinary aspects, his willingness to answer "just because" to difficult questions.

Yet, there are moments in all of Brautigan's works, this latest book included, when his semimystical vision of things is so clear, so entertaining and so passionate that a critical, analytic response makes you feel like a chaperone checking the prom punch for vodka — you may be right, but you're a killjoy.

The book is a collection of rapid-fire vignettes, personal anecdotes, essays and short stories (classifications are rather difficult with Brautigan, and, finally, beside the point). Packed within its 258 pages are 131 glimpses into the infinite variety of human activities: a priest looking for a parking spot, a Czechoslovakian immigrant searching for America's Golden Dream, a Texas businessman toasting a ghost who comforted him as a boy, an Indian woman searching for a tire chain along a New Mexico highway. Intermingled with this amorphous crowd is the figure of Brautigan himself photographing old Christmas trees, throwing corn to chickens and buying light bulbs.

The Tokyo-Montana Express of the title is, according to the author, a train that travels from Montana to Japan with sidetracks into New Mexico and California, and each of the individual sections of the novel is a stop along the way. As readers, we are passengers on the train glimpsing through the windows the small and large dramas of everyday life. If one stop leaves us dissatisfied, no matter, for Brautigan's express quickly carries us to yet another scene.

This is an entertaining book that is often funny and often sad; when Brautigan is at his best, his book is home-folks wise. During these moments, we see the world as Brautigan does — a place so special, so magical that the most trivial, commonplace aspects of life shimmer with meaning and incandescence.


San Diego Union?
November 2, 1980: Book Section Page 5



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