Book Review – Revenge of the Lawn

Richard Brautigan's Only Short-Story Collection is a Diary of Sorts

May 11, 2009

These stories - written between 1962 and 1970 - range from surreal and dark to whimsical and weightless, usually all at once. Results vary, but brilliance is apparent.

Even though it’s important to revise work and emphasize the “craft” part of narrative craft, there’s something to be said of first drafts. To call the stories in Richard Brautigan’s 1971 collection Revenge of the Lawn (Simon & Schuster. ISBN 0-671-20960-4) “raw” or “perfectly flawed” doesn’t really do the stories justice. Most of these pieces are bizarre, weird tales that twist within themselves and then back out – like literary dreams and money working dirty-handedly together in “1/3, 1/3, 1/3” or the light-humor of “Ernest Hemingway’s Typist” – as the form seems to follow no rules at one point of another.

The same could be said for the rest of the collection, as nearly half of it is either boring (“The Post Offices of Eastern Oregon”) or too cryptic (“A Need For Gardens”) or both (“1692 Cotton Mather Newsreel”). Half of it isn’t, though, and there’s a sweet sweet poetry to short pieces like “An Unlimited Supply of 35 Millimetre Film” and “Coffee.”

A Diary of Stories

It’s doubtful that a person would go back and revise his or her diary, and to expect a strict sense of revision from a collection such as this seems to be as absurd as suggesting that Brautigan revise his diary. The stories here have a sort of tossed-off quality to them, the same sort of feelings that the music of the Melvins or the shows of Larry David provoke.

These stories seem to work very hard at sounding like they don’t work hard at all. These sixty-two stories don’t necessarily come off like crafted masterworks as much as a series of fictional journal entries taking us through the eight years it took to write them.

The Absence of Thought When Feeling

Brautigan’s tone lends a sort of ambience to the digestion of these stories, as if he has a direct connection to emotions. To read these stories is almost the same as not reading anything at all. Brautigan presents the reader with the ability to skip directly to the end result of a story: the pain or joy of a connection with another person or thing.

There’s some sort of enjoyment in absorbing art without the mechanics of it all, whether it be listening to music that makes a person feel as if it’s just in her brain or reading stories that seem like they’re just playing in her head.

Brautigan Goes for the Larger Picture

After 62 stories in a row, it’s likely that someone will finish this book and not remember much of the details. However, Brautigan’s charm lies not in his ability to tell a good, memorable story, but in his ability to produce a memorable emotion within the reader. Even fans of traditionally plotted stories will have to admit that the end result is feeling and connection, and that’s the point of Brautigan’s work in Revenge of the Lawn.

The copyright of the article Book Review – Revenge of the Lawn in American Fiction is owned by Ryan Werner. Permission to republish Book Review – Revenge of the Lawn in print or online must be granted by the author in writing.