Trout Fishing in America by Richard Brautigan

The creek was made narrow by little green trees that grew too close together. The creek was like 12,845 telephone booths in a row with high Victorian ceilings and all the doors taken off and all the backs of the booths knocked out.

Sometimes when I went fishing in there, I felt just like a telephone repairman, even though I did not look like one. I was only a kid covered with fishing tackle, but in some strange way by going in there and catching a few trout, I kept the telephones in service. I was an asset to society.

It was pleasant work, but at times it made me uneasy. It could grow dark in there instantly when there were some clouds in the sky and they worked their way onto the sun. Then you almost needed candles to fish by, and foxfire in your reflexes.

What is "Trout Fishing in America?" In Richard Brautigan's collection of short pieces, it's a lot of things: a book, a person, sometimes more than one person, a hotel. It's an activity, of course, but the kind of activity that talks back to you, or makes walnut catsup to eat on hamburgers, along with his girlfriend, Maria Callas. It's hard to explain exactly what Trout Fishing in America is, and it's hard to explain what Trout Fishing in America is, except that it's not like anything I've read before, which is always, always, always the single best thing that I could say about a book.

Brautigan's pieces borrow from the language of San Francisco beatniks and hippies, but this is a book of the Pacific Northwest, the interior especially, along the clear streams of Idaho. Brautigan's narrator--if indeed it is the same person speaking in each of the 1-3 page pieces that make up the novel--is always looking for a good place to fish, and only sometimes finding it. It's an American activity, mixed up with the ruggedness of the Mountain West and the self-sufficiency of winos and derelicts, people who by nature must fend for themselves. The narrator is often foiled in his search for the right place to fish:  an inviting creek with a waterfall turns out to be a set of stairs, or no one stops to pick up the hitchhiking fisherman. The narrator describes a stepfather who described "trout as if they were a precious and intelligent metal":

Silver is not a good adjective to describe what I felt when he told me about trout fishing.

I'd like to get it right.

Maybe trout steel. Steel made from trout. The clear snow-filled river acting as foundry and heat.

Imagine Pittsburgh.

A steel that comes from trout, used to make buildings, trains, and tunnels.

The Andrew Carnegie of trout!

The chapters themselves are slippery things, like trout, mash-em-ups of images that refuse to come together for easy readings. "Trout Fishing on the Street of Eternity" begins on the Calle de Eternidad in Gelatao, Mexico, and ends up a story about the narrator's youth working for an old woman. It never returns to Mexico, so what were we doing there? In "The Cleveland Wrecking Yard," the narrator investigates a junk store where you can buy a fishing stream cut up in into measured lengths, like pipes. The stories are defined by this kind of absurdism and playfulness, which I really enjoyed. Taken together, a picture emerges of America in the 20th century, rediscovering its own natural patrimony: camping, fishing, mountaineering, the national forests, etc., etc.  "As much as anything else," we're told, "the Coleman lantern is the symbol of the camping craze that is currently sweeping America, with its unholy white light burning in the forests of America." The narrator has a baby with his girlfriend, and they take it with them into the woods, bringing the mid-century hope of domestic life out into the American landscape.

I really enjoyed Trout Fishing in America, and I think I'll be thinking about it for a long time. I'm not a fisherman--I've never had the patience--but it spoke to a kind of pride and love deep within me for the American landscape and the way it has shaped the American character.