Briefly Examining a Relic

My time getting to posts has been pinched, and maybe tomorrow, Friday, will prove more fruitful for this venue, but I thought I'd mention quickly a relic I've discovered.

For me, like usual, relics consist of books.

At the $1 Bookstore in downtown Long Beach, a place even more disheveled than you may imagine, I was digging around in some stacks when I saw the following cover:

I squinted and looked closer, and was pretty sure that was the Ben Franklin statue in San Francisco. Checking the spine of the slim book I saw the title: Trout Fishing in America; and the author: Richard Brautigan.

I opened it up and took a look at the title page:

There was a note that about the cover on the page with  the publication information (it was the SF Franklin statue) and noticed it was published originally in 1967.

I saw that the "chapters" numbered more than thirty, for a book with less than one-hundred-fifty pages. It was published in 1967. It was composed somewhat in the years leading to 1967 in San Francisco. Those three things coupled with that title page led me to a specific conclusion standing in the bookstore: holy moly, this must be an LSD relic.

And it totally is.

One thing it's specifically not is a novel, like the title page says. It's a somewhat lucid collection of pieces, some of which are quite excellent, many of which are frivolous and "experimental" (please remember, in literature, mostly experimental = bad)(I know from personal experience), and a few others are random and possibly connected to each other, and possibly composed while wasted on acid.

Trout Fishing in America at times is the name of a character, at other times is the name of a recipe, and others, just the simple activity that it sounds like. Trout are the spirit animals of the book, a legacy that's influenced Tom Robbins with Even Cowgirls Get the Blues and whooping cranes, and then, passing it along to me with my current novel and bobcats.

I looked up some information on Brautigan. He was mentioned by Patton Oswalt in Zombie Spaceship Wasteland, Patton's treatise on personal history and artistic-minded outcasts, as an influence. He was a big member of the sixties literary movement, apparently, but today Brautigan's influence and importance are disputed.

Influence may be one thing, something maybe easier to establish. But it seems the main debate is on importance. Many folks think the book is brilliant and maybe a milestone. I've seen one "review" that claimed the collection of pieces were connected and made the entire enterprise a novella if not a novel. Once, back in 2002, I put together a collection of "loosely related" pieces that made up one whole story, and from experience I can safely say that a novel/novella is not made by this action.

I can think of another loosely connected short fiction collection that is actually a work of genius: Jesus' Son, by Denis Johnson. Widely regarded as a masterpiece of the form--short fiction--it has never been forced into a categorical title like novel or novella. (I can't recommend that tiny book loudly enough.)

So, my own opinion on this particular book falls closer to one of the few dissenters on the site I was examining. He claimed that the time period for which this book was speaker of and speaker to has passed, and the context in which it is important is not necessarily around anymore, which means it doesn't transcend it's publishing context.

In any case, the book's a trip. Like, literally.

It's definitely not specifically bad...in fact it's mostly charming. I guess I didn't mean to take it to task, just the notion that it's some awesome thing from the hippie era that still influences folks today. That notion, which I've encountered on the Internet, is one with which I do not agree.