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by Diane Witosky?
Richard Brautigan's ninth novel is a train trip through life, shuttling between Montana and Japan via a series of parables.
Told in a series of stories, Brautigan's book captures the rhythm of the rails. Some of the stories are fleeting glimpses through the window — a young boy playing with a pair of drumsticks flashes by — while others are full stops, giving the reader time to stretch his legs and walk around the station.
It is this sense of the flow of life that keeps this book on track as a novel and not merely a collection of short stories. There are some recurring topics. Brautigan's chickens and his passion for firm-breasted Chinese women are two.
"The Tokyo-Montana Express" is a mid-life journey. There is no discussion of birth, but a great deal of consideration of aging and death, of human achievement and human loss, of lust and passion and the ending of relationships.
Brautigan deals with these subjects with his characteristic humor; sometimes there is cynicism, occasionally crudity. There are moments of whimsy, Laurel and Hardy snowflakes in "The Smallest Snowstorm on Record," and surrealism, "Werewolf Raspberries?."
There also are moments of pain, as when he relates the story of a young Japanese boy who commits suicide rather than live with only one arm, and there are moments of tenderness, as he explains "The Irrevocable Sadness of Her Thank You?."
Brautigan has been called by some critics a modern Mark Twain?. The comparison is fitting. His writing flows smoothly, carrying the reader along with humor and warmth. It is only afterward that the reader becomes aware of the underlying anger and perhaps a tinge of bitterness.
The Twain image fits Brautigan the person, too. He has been described [by Stephen Schneck] as "a 6-foot country boy, with wire-rim glasses and a homemade haircut and a shaggy wild-west mustache that doesn't quite hide a perpetual grin ... Inside this hulking innocent, this country bumpkin, is a special (very special) correspondent for a terribly literate sort of Field & Stream magazine."
As in his previous works, the narrator, or conductor, on this train is not Brautigan, who is actually a private person who will not permit publication of any biographical information. In his short preface, Brautigan explains: "The 'I' in this book is the voice of the stations along the tracks of the Tokyo-Montana Express."
Whoever the "I" is, he has a deep feeling for people. His sketches of women are especially sensitive, seeming at first to dwell on the physical but soon turning into emotional portraits.
Some of his chapters have tongue-in-cheek morals attached, but each also carries a message. For example, Brautigan decries American's willingness to waste objects and lives as he describes discarded Christmas trees as lying on the streets like fallen soldiers. Another time he makes his point by comparing the soft, glowing eyes of a happily subservient Japanese wife to the hard, hate-filled eyes of feminists he supposes are reading the piece.
Brautigan's previous books have been criticized for being too optimistic, too willing to ignore catastrophes. But it is this very trait that makes his view of life and death work. His ability to look at human loss, including death, with compassion, then move on to a flight of fancy, fits life's cycle and, again, the rhythm of his train.
If this novel has an over-all message binding it together, this is it: Life goes on.
From his opening story of Joseph Francl, who died "not unhappily," to his closing view of a teletype machine chattering a bright "Good morning, subscribers," Brautigan's train takes the reader on a thoughtful, thought-provoking trip.
Des Moines Sunday Register?
December 28, 1980: 5C
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