AN UNFORTUNATE WOMAN

A suicide victim in 1984 when he was just short of 50, the prolific Brautigan is best remembered for Trout Fishing in America and The Revenge of the Lawn (1971). Now comes an eccentric little novel finished in 1982—and this droll, gifted, brilliant writer comes to life all over again (also see p. 762).

Imagine a writer (unnamed, but Brautigan to a tee) buying a 160-page notebook on his 47th birthday and then filling it up, sometimes daily, sometimes after long hiatuses, making of it “a calendar of one man’s journey during a few months of his life.” This is Brautigan’s plan, however imperfectly fulfilled—a plan simple indeed but one deepened considerably not only by a preface about a friend dead of cancer that same year but also by the fact of the largely itinerant narrator’s living off and on during the year in a house where someone recently committed suicide—the title’s “unfortunate woman.” But does Brautigan go straight to this subject of fear, despair, and death? Well, any who know Brautigan know that’s never the way he goes, and here are deceptively lighthearted pages about a chicken in Hawaii, a drinking bout in Alaska, a pastry being eaten in California, an imaginary courtroom with a man on trial for not being able to remember what day it was when he last stopped writing, a tiny spider, in Montana, on a porch, settling in the hair of the writer’s arm, aiming to make a tiny web there. Like Laurence Sterne, Brautigan is “actually writing about something quite serious, but . . . in a roundabout way,” and, like Whitman, he’s writing about the greatest enormities as sensed in the smallest turnings of nature and of self. The book is about a man thinking, and if “A terrible sadness is coming over me,” as the narrator says toward the end, the sorrow is transformed for the reader into something ever durable, hopeful, and alive.

A treasure.