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by Colin McEnroe?
If brain candy causes mental decay, reading Richard Brautigan and Tom Robbins could give you a bigger cranial cavity than a looney lobotomist with a loaded laser.
Maybe it's unfair to tar them with the same brush; but let's face it: both writers are products of the "hippy novelist" movement that allowed cuteness to substitute for hard work and writing talent.
The best way to disparage Brautigan's new collection of pointless vignettes would be to publish a handful of them. They represent some of the most vacuous half-hearted drivel ever to be bound between hard covers. A typical chapter describes a cat eating cantaloupe rinds.
Brautigan wonders what else a cat might normally eat that would taste like cantaloupe. Then in a masterstroke of literary brilliance, he sums it all up in a glowing nugget of wisdom: "I have not the slightest idea nor will I probably ever have but I know one thing for certain: I will never walk into a grocery store and go to the pet food section and see a can of cat cantaloupe on the shelf."
$10.95 for this?
Brautigan has not always been quite so appallingly vapid. "The Abortion: An Historical Romance 1966" still ranks as a fine and moving novel, and even "Willard and His Bowling Trophies" contained a few poignant moments.
What makes "The Tokyo-Montana Express" so egregiously stupid and flimsy is the obvious laziness with which it was put together. Most of the vignettes and essays are no more than two pages long. There appear to be about 120 of them (I refuse to count), and they are not arranged in any particular order.
If roused from his intellectual torpor, Brautigan might be moved to argue that the segments are arranged in an intuitively determined order, so as to evoke a certain chain of emotions like a series of Emersonian poems or Greek epigrams. The proof is in the reading. Brautigan's passages evoke nothing more than disdain for a moderately talented writer lacking the gumption and courage to create something more meaningful and personal.
To his credit Brautigan is without pretension. He confesses to being a cerebral lightweight on any number of occasions. He writes that he prefers The National Enquirer to The New York Times and that, when people try to discuss world events with him, he would rather think about why the light is on late at night in his neighborhood milk shake shop during the winter months, when the place is closed.
The question that remains is: Does anyone else care enough about the light at the Tastee-Freeze to read 2½ pages of wispy contemplations about it?
There are one or two flashes of Brautiganian imagery that recall the days of yore, when he seemed to have something to say. To wit: "My mind is racing forward at such a speed that compared to it, a bolt of lightning would seem like an ice cube in an old woman's forlorn glass of weak lemonade on some front porch lost in Louisiana. She stares straight ahead at nothing, holding the glass of lemonade in her hand."
Unfortunately, most of these images serve only to illustrate some incredibly trivial observation Brautigan wants to make. Most of these pearls of enlightenment are the sorts of banal, commonly known facts of life that mental patients often sputter about when they endeavor to strike up conversations with visiting strangers.
Robbins is a slightly different phenomenon. Brautigan has published, for better or worse, 19 books. "Still Life With Woodpecker" is Robbins' third novel. His second, "Even Cowgirls Get the Blues" catapulted him into the spotlight and amassed for him a rather large cult of admirers.
For all its trendiness, "Cowgirls" was riddled with major flaws. Robbins showed all the signs of a severe case of the disease that occasionally plagued his literary godfather, Kurt Vonnegut?. The ideas were good, but Robbins failed to write about his characters with enough honest passion to make them believable or sympathetic. When tragedy strikes the cowgirls, no one cares, because they were cartoon characters to begin with.
"Still Life" proves that Robbins has not taken a single step toward solving this problem. What's more, he has settled into a very formulaic writing style, riddled with silly puns and facile statements like: "Equality is not in regarding different things similarly, equality is in regarding different things differently."
As usual, Robbins has a semi-mystically endowed heroine. Princess Leigh-Cheri starts to seem more and more like Sissy, of "Cowgirls" fame, as the book progresses. Just substitute flaming red hair for the long thumb. As usual, Robbins has tried to make literary capital out of some physical asset, hammering away at its implications every three or four paragraphs.
As usual, Robbins has crammed his book with trendy subjects: pyramid power, astrology, outlaw mythology and lunar birth control. He has the audacity to try to satirize that very sort of chic interest in New Age eco-mysticism while buying very heavily into it.
There's a queen who says "Oh-Oh spaghetti-o" until even the patient reader will want to paste her fazoola shut and a cocaine-snorting crone whose novelty wears off around mid-novel. The leading man is a terrorist named Bernard Mickey Wrangle whose persona makes about as much sense as the segment where Wrangle and the princess apparently plunge into the desert scene on a package of camels — a literary device that's more abused and overworked than the average J.P. Stevens machine operator.
As usual, Robbins has failed to present any of his characters with enough care and conviction to make us worry very much about what happens to them. As usual, he wanders off from his flimsy plot for any number of tedious discourses on absurd topics. He even apologizes for the failure to present a well-paced plot, but he doesn't do anything about it.
Another Robbins device in this novel is a series of interludes in which the writer discusses the typewriter he is using and the problems it presents. This is about as interesting (and as funny) as the section about the whaling industry in "Moby Dick."
There are partially redeeming moments. A poet's brilliant and incisive attack on out-of-body insemination and a few funny lines and images come to mind. But they're just not enough.
Near the end, Robbins remarks to his reader "...you've been a good audience, probably better than an underdeveloped novelist with an overdeveloped typewriter deserves..."
I couldn't have said it better myself.
Hartford Courant?
October 19, 1980
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