Book of a Lifetime: Revenge of the Lawn by Richard Brautigan

From The Independent archive: Sarah Hall on ‘Revenge of the Lawn’ by Richard Brautigan

Deceptively informal: Richard Brautigan (Archive)

Many attempts have been made to define Richard Brautigan’s work – Beat, scat, Zen Buddhist, magical-realist, hippie, cult, outsider, naive, 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 northwest 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!

The 2014 paperback edition, issued to mark 30 years since the author’s death (Handout)

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”.