Richard Brautigan's tale of a journey through the Northwest and the mind (although it is never clear which one is which) is one that I would put in the poetry category before I would label it as fiction. Trout Fishing in America toys with every literary device born of the beatnik generation, but perhaps is most beautiful and telling in it use of various images. Jane marked this delightful passage:
"The next morning I got up early and ate my breakfast. I took a slice of white bread to use for bait. I planned on making doughballs from the soft center of the bread and putting them on my vaudevillian hook. I left the place and walked down to the different street corner. How beautiful the field looked and the creek that came pouring down in a waterfall off the hill. But as I got closer to the creek I could see something was wrong. The creek did not act right. There was a strangeness to it. There was a thing about its motions that was wrong. Finally I got close enough to see what the trouble was. The waterfall was just a flight of white wooden stairs leading up to a house in the trees. I stood there for a long time, looking up and looking down, following the stairs with my eyes, having trouble believing. Then I knocked on my creek and heard the sound of wood. I ended up being my own trout and eating the slice of bread myself."
This passage certainly shows Brautigan's knack for images, but maybe is not overly representative of the book as a whole. This passage is much more of a narrative than the bulk of the book. Other passages are strings of images, seemingly unrelated.
The beauty of such images is that the book gives you feelings, without telling you stories, which is truly challenging. Initially, I found myself trying to follow a succession of events and only after forgetting this method entirely, was I truly able to be taken by the book, although not always somewhere that I wanted to go.
In discussing the book, it was great to be reminded of moments that others had loved that I had forgotten or not noticed. Please share if there are any images or passages that stuck with you!
