Trout Fishing with Richard Brautigan

How to describe Trout Fishing in America? How to describe any of Richard Brautigan’s works? The closest working definition I can come up with is this: the mutant offspring of a booze-swilling novel and a poem strained through a mystic’s pajamas with the dark and sunny side of the American Dream alternating days as nanny. And that still isn’t sufficient. 

Brautigan is brilliant. When I say that I’m referring to all of his books, but, for now, I think I’m better off to take each one individually, and right now Trout Fishing in America gets to enjoy the attention. It’s so short. And simple. And while an occasional plot appears from one fishing trip to the next, there largely is no plot. Every chapter is a short, simple, fragmented view of a particular moment or train of thought that in some way reveals a truth of America.

There is no way to sufficiently describe what the book is about because of its experimental style and resistance to categorization, but I’ll try to light a match over it so we can at least make out the outlines. Trout Fishing in America is mostly about just that, trout fishing in America. Brautigan gives accounts of various trout fishing trips he’s gone on throughout his life, some when he was young, and some once he is older, married, and has a child. I don’t know to what degree these accounts are fictionalized, but, at least from my perspective, they seem to have some basis in real life experience for the author. There’s the quick story of the Kool-Aid wino. There’s the character, Trout Fishing in America Shorty, probably the funniest character in all the novel. And there’s mayonnaise.

These are the kinds of things that pop up from one chapter to the next. If the exceedingly short length of each chapter (typically around two pages) and the beautiful employment of language did not already give it away, perhaps the jump from one topic to another as one chapter closes and the next begins (with the only thread of unity usually being the voyeuristic peek into America’s cognitive outhouse) will make it clear: each chapter is a prose poem.

Altogether, Trout Fishing in America is Richard Brautigan’s meditation on America—what it is, where it’s going, and how it’s not just a place but a buddy that’s along for the ride with each and every person. Whether he intended it as a main focus or not, Brautigan also managed to simultaneously undermine and reevaluate the novel form, and not in a bad way.