Trout Fishing in America, In Watermelon Sugar
Richard Brautigan
Houghton Mifflin Company
1967, 1968
Ms. Hen read TROUT FISHING IN AMERICA
many years ago, when she was a young hen. She had read in the newspaper that a
high school student changed his name to Trout Fishing in America, and she
thought it was the strangest thing she had ever heard. She wanted to know why a
person would change their name to the name of a book. She happened to find a
copy of the book in her house, which was odd; whoever lived in the house
before had left it behind. The book was moldy and it smelled, but she read it,
and she was able to comprehend why a person would change his name to the name
of this book. The novel isn’t about trout fishing, even though there is trout
fishing in every chapter. It’s about everything in the world, and it’s about
the meaning of life, and how the totality of existence means that the universe is
strange and nothing makes sense. She understood the book when she read it back
then, but did not hold on to her copy. She bought another copy recently for her
trip to San Francisco because she remembered it was a San Francisco novel. And
it is. She did read some of it on her vacation, and she finished it on the plane
ride home. She looked up the man who changed his name to Trout Fishing in
America, and she discovered that now he teaches English in Japan.
In this book are two other books, a book of
poetry, THE PILL VERSUS THE SPRINGHILL MINE DISASTER, which Ms. Hen did not
read, because she finds it difficult and tedious to read poetry, even though
she does write it, sometimes reading it makes her eyes cross; it also
contains IN WATERMELON SUGAR, which Ms. Hen truly enjoyed.
IN WATERMELON SUGAR is about a town made of
watermelon sugar. There is no location or state mentioned where the town is
located, but Ms. Hen imagines it is in California. This book is quirky. The
protagonist does not have a name, and he is writing a book and he does not know
the subject. He lives in a small town, and bizarre things have happened
there. Tigers once roamed the town and killed people. A gang of dangerous men
ran around and harassed people, who ended up in a bloodbath. Ms. Hen thinks she
liked this more than TROUT FISHING IN AMERICA, because it was more of a linear
narrative, and she could understand the characters better. But the message is the
same, nothing makes any sense in the world, and some things are just demented
and distorted, but we have to do the best we can to find happiness.
Ms. Hen learned that Richard Brautigan
committed suicide at the age of forty-nine. It made her sad to think that
someone so talented and intelligent could take his own life. She thought of
other writers who killed themselves: Ernest Hemingway, Sylvia Plath, Virginia
Woolf. She thinks that they might have felt the world too deeply and honestly
and that drove them to take their own lives. The world can be an insane and
erratic place, and sometimes people can’t survive. Ms. Hen mourns for these
writers, and their stars that shone and had so much to say, but were
dimmed too soon.
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