Revenge of the Lawn: Stories 1962-1970 is a collection of 62 short stories written by the American author Richard Brautigan from 1962 to 1970. Like most of Brautigan's works, the stories are whimsical, simply themed, and often surreal. Many of the stories were originally published elsewhere. The book also contains two missing chapters from his work Trout Fishing in America, "Rembrandt Creek" and "Carthage Sink".
Book Of A Lifetime: Revenge of the Lawn, By Richard Brautigan
Reviewed by Sarah Hall
The Independent
Friday 19 June 2009
Many attempts have been made to define Richard Brautigan's work - Beat, scat, Zen Buddhist, magical-realist, hippie, cult, outsider, naïve, pacific, lunatic. Nowhere is his work's resistance to categorical designation more apparent than in Revenge of the Lawn: Stories 1962-1970. I came across this oddest collection in my late teens, which might be a perfect age to discover Brautigan. The vim and originality of tones and images, the berserk plots and off-the-wall incidents, seemed perfectly pitched to appeal to a rebellious, youthful sense of humour. The language was deceptively informal, poetic, "hip". Back then I was a troubled reader, full of north-west rain and rural loneliness. Books felt like portals into even remoter worlds - papery oubliettes where no one else existed and the author was absent. I wanted company, not a textual abstract.
But here was a sudden, slender volume that was host to a multitude of companionable voices. Some of the pieces were startlingly brief; I could open the pages and hop in and out. More than this: amid the rabble of characters was a singular presence – the writer was there, in some state or other. He was there, playing around, often exposed and steering the narrative the way authors were not supposed to. I could imagine verbal and metaphysical light bulbs going on above his head. I could see him crafting these extraordinary, joyful, lovelorn gifts of prose and handing them over to me, the reader. And what gifts! I loved the operatic, whisky-cooking grandmothers, the man who replaces his plumbing with poetry only to end up in a fist-fight with the verses of Emily Dickinson, and that little old lady who demands a pound of liver from the butcher for her bees. I loved the strings of words: "ragged black toothache sky", "wheelbarrow-sized pile of steaming dragon shit", "April in God-damn".
I was moved by the difficult human exchanges, heartbreaks and eroticisms. I was charmed by the disorderly conduct, wrong-footed by tales that seemed to be about banking, and then were about corpses, and then were about banking again. This was the imagination unbound; on the page, literally anything was possible.
What appealed to me then appeals to me now. Brautigan is a folk-artist, a master storyteller, and a master rule-breaker. He isn't coy or transparent. He is enormously ambitious and because of this, occasionally falls off the wire – with exuberant, random metaphors that don't quite work and sentences employed simply to justify a previous whimsy.
But I don't care. I like heart and imperfection. And because of it, the stories never loose their freshness. Revenge of the Lawn remains vibrant, radical and generous: 25 years after his death, Brautigan is still, like his poverty-stricken Oregon typist, "pounding at the gates of American literature".
Contents
"Revenge of the Lawn"
"1692 Cotton Mather Newsreel"
"1/3, 1/3, 1/3"
"The Gathering of a Californian"
"A Short Story About Contemporary Life in California"
"Pacific Radio Fire"
"Elmira"
"Coffee"
The Lost Chapters of Trout Fishing in America: "Rembrandt Creek" and "Carthage Sink"
"The Weather in San Francisco"
"Complicated Banking Problems"
"A High Building in Singapore"
"An Unlimited Supply of 35 Milimetre Film"
"The Scarlatti Tilt"
"The Wild Birds of Heaven"
"Winter Rug"
"Ernest Hemingway's Typist"
"Homage to the San Francisco YMCA"
"The Pretty Office"
"A Need for Gardens"
"The Old Bus"
"The Ghost Children of Tacoma"
"Talk Show"
"I Was Trying to Describe You to Someone"
"Trick or Treating Down to the Sea in Ships"
"Blackberry Motorist"
"Thoreau Rubber Band"
"44:00"
"Perfect California Day"
"The Post Offices of Eastern Oregon"
"Pale Marble Movie"
"Partners"
"Getting to Know Each Other"
"A Short History of Oregon"
"A Long Time Ago People Decided to Live in America"
"A Short History of Religion in California"
"April in God-damn"
"One Afternoon in 1939"
"Corporal"
"Lint"
"A Complete History of Germany and Japan"
"The Auction"
"The Armoured Car"
"The Literary Life in California/1964"
"Banners of My Own Choosing"
"Fame in California/1964"
"Memory of a Girl"
"September California"
"A Study of California Flowers"
"The Betrayed Kingdom"
"Women When They Put Their Clothes On in the Morning"
"Hallowe'en in Denver"
"Atlantisburg"
"A View from the Dog Tower"
"Greyhound Tragedy"
"Crazy Old Women are Riding the Buses of America Today"
"The Correct Time"
"Holiday in Germany"
"Sand Castles"
"Forgiven"
"American Flag Decal"
"World War I Los Angeles Aeroplane"