Richard Brautigan's Trout Fishing in America: Notes of a Native Son

Abstract

ESPITE its crystal-clear surface, placid babble, and meandering ILW course, Richard Brautigan's novel Trout Fishing in America (i967) offers the critical angler some tricky crosscurrents, deep holes, and big fish.' Through the cool waters of Brautigan's book flow the main currents of American thought-individualism, progress, love, death, and escape. Like Hemingway's Big Two-Hearted River, Frost's West-Running Brook, and Eliot's strong brown god, Brautigan's trout streams carry the flotsam and jetsam of American dreams, the hopes and fears of innocents, explorers, and vagrants. Tree, snow and rock beginnings, the mountain in back of the lake promised us eternity, the nameless narrator tells us in a chapter entitled The Pudding Master of Stanley Basin; but the lake itself was filled with thousands of silly minnows, swimming close to the shore and busy putting in hours of Mack Sennett time (p. 64). Again and again, Brautigan's characters cast into the waters only to come up with the detritus of America's past. Brautigan's slim, unprepossessing book is, thus, far deeper and darker than early reviewers imagined it to be.2 Trout Fishing offers, to borrow terms from Roland Barthes, a network of references, ruses, and enigmas, the traces of a culture and its writing.' During the