Beaver,1977

"Dead Pan Alley"
Harold Beaver
The Times Literary Supplement [London], 1 Apr. 1977, p. 392.
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Though subtitled "A Japanese Novel" and dedicated to Junichiro Tanizaki, admirers of Richard Brautigan need not worry. His seventh novel is the same mixture as before: a jigsaw of anecdotes—part sentimental idyll, part comic strip fantasy—retailed in eighty bizarre sequences, or shots, as from a film, or frames, or chapters varying in length from a picture postcard to an airletter form.

There is this well-known American humorist, heartbroken because his girlfriend has left him. There is this story of an ice-cold sombrero that falls out of a blue sky (the work of this well-known, heartbroken humorist) which he tears up and drops into an empty wastepaper basket. Mix and shuffle. The Japanese girl dreams a self-obliterating dream that she will never remember. The sombrero story perpetuates itself in the wastepaper basket, developing into gunbattles, mayhem and national holocaust. The humorist potters about his apartment—opening and closing the refrigerator, telephoning girlfriends, searching the floor for a strand of black Japanese hair—consumed by self-propagating obsessions: "He never lacked things to worry about. They followed him around like millions of trained white mice and he was their master. If he taught all his worries to sing, they would have made the Mormon Tabernacle Choir sound like a potato."

It is a three-way scramble, then, between self-perpetuating nightmares, erotic daydreams that mix with dietary or other obsessions to haunt the bored, insecure mind, and the renewal, in deep sleep, of mental stability. The public moral (of the sombrero story) is: "There is more to life than meets the eye." The private moral (for the Japanese girl, a psychiatric nurse working in the emergency ward of a San Francisco hospital) is: beware of authors—

"She was never going to go out with another writer: no matter how charming, sensitive, inventive or fun they could be. They weren't worth it in the long run. They were emotionally too expensive and the upkeep was too complicated. They were like having a vacuum cleaner around that broke all the time and only Einstein could fix it. She wanted her next lover to be a broom."

Two of these strands form an interweaving of opposites: of nurse and patient, Asian and Caucasian, purring calm and tearful neurosis, tinkling laughter and fabricated humor. The breakdown of this private bonding simultaneously explodes, in a public mystery—a Wild West fission (complete with gun-slinging sheriffs, helicopters and the National Guard) in the wastepaper basket. The mayor's apocalyptic car number plate is "AZ 1492"; enter Norman Mailer, war correspondent of the armies of the night:

"Again and again he exposed himself to tremendous concentrations of townspeople firepower . . . The tank that Norman Mailer was riding in was hit and two men were killed inside it. Mailer and the rest of the crew climbed out. They were covered with blood from the dead men. All round them small arms fire was oxidizing the air. It was a very dangerous situation, but miraculously Mailer got out of it alive. He was interviewed by television newsmen a few moments after he got back. He was covered with so much blood that it looked as if he had been hit himself.
"What was it like?" was the first question Mailer was asked.
Later on that evening 100 million Americans saw Norman Mailer, covered with blood, say, 'Hell. There is no other word for it. Hell.'"

The American humorist, splitting from his Japanese girlfriend inaugurates or anticipates that public hell. As in the final midair collision of two helicopters, they seem "like two, tall awkward people getting tangled up together in a revolving door during an earthquake."

Fracture is the essence of Brautigan's craft: the separation of perceptions, chapters, ideograms, like the separation of the two lovers sixteen blocks apart. It is an art as Nathanael West would have said of "the dead pan." Each movement is arrested in a breath, transformed into a metaphor. Like a curator displaying a butterfly case, Brautigan moves on from specimen to specimen. The drollery lies in the narrations; the meaning in their intersections. But it is only fair to warn new readers that they may not be captivated by it; as Brautigan says of his own goofy protagonist: "it was just that his mind translated this into a twelve-ring circus with most of the acts not worth watching a second time. After a while non-stop brilliance has the same effect as non-stop boredom."

Christgau,1976

"A Frigid Hat"
Robert Christgau
The New York Times Book Review, 10 Oct. 1976, Sec. 7, p. 4.
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Richard Brautigan inspired some foolish praise in his time, a time that ended almost as soon as it began, but he never angled for it and that is to his credit. He is a serious writer, certainly, but the mark of his seriousness is in his craft, especially as a stylist; he is not pretentious. Thus his 1971 novel The Abortion, is dedicated to someone named Frank, apparently a slow reader: "come on in-/read novel-/it's on the table/in front room. I'll be back/in about/2 hours." And the protagonist of his new book is identified as a "very well-known American humorist." Not novelist or poet, not even writer—just humorist.

For at his best that is what Brautigan is. Compared to Doris Lessing or Frank O'Hara he's a midget, but be stands tall enough next to Woody Allen, or even Robert Benchley or George Ade; on a small scale he has been an original and an innovator. As might have been predicted, however, Sombrero Fallout does not represent Brautigan at his best. Not only is it the least funny of his books, but its paucity of humor is intentional, capping a dilemma that would appear to be permanent: he no longer knows what to write about.

The three novels that brought Brautigan his fame around 1970—A Confederate General From Big Sur, Trout Fishing in America and In Watermelon Sugar—were reprints. They were written in the early and mid-60s, when Brautigan was an impecunious, poetry-writing bohemian from northern California. It isn't likely that he foresaw the role bohemians from northern California were about to assume in the national imagination any more than anyone else did. But he will survive as the literary representative of that phenomenon in American culture known as The Hippies.

Brautigan's reputation is based on a surrealism notable for its grace, its matter-of-fact flow; his narrative technique is so conversational and pellucid that preternatural details and crazy coincidences don't even ripple its surface. (Certain rock lyrics, carried along on the beat, achieve a not dissimilar effect. In fact, Brautigan's chief competition in the realm of hippie art comes from the Grateful Dead, who make up for not being funny by being good to dance to.) But his best work—especially A Confederate General From Big Sur, but also Trout Fishing in America and the more memorable stories—is realistic much of the time, as remarkable for its content as for its form. Brautigan documented a way of life in which his style of surrealism was almost second nature, evoking 60's bohemianism far more intensely than Kerouac ever did that of the 50's. His world was passive and goofy; his voice displayed whimsical (if not coy) amazement at the most banal of events. As he teetered between the edge of comfort and the edge of survival, Brautigan was often sad but never pessimistic.

As the broad attraction of this gentle vision among the literate young became apparent, however, Brautigan was transformed from an impecunious bohemian into a successful popular author. It was a big change, and he knew it. Each of the three novels to appear after his success—The Abortion: An Historical Romance 1966 (1971), The Hawkline Monster: A Gothic Western (1974), and Willard and His Bowling Trophies: A Perverse Mystery (1975)—is subtitled to indicate some sort of play with a popular literary form. What's more, after The Abortion, a bohemian novel much fatter and more perfunctory than the earlier ones, Brautigan tried to do what popular authors do—invent plots and characters. He has not proved to be very good at this, and his failure seems to have cut into his optimism quite a bit.

The full title of the new book is Sombrero Fallout: A Japanese Novel. The subtitle is ambiguous, the book is dedicated to a Japanese novelist of the respectably perverse, whose main similarity to the old optimistic Brautigan is brevity. But if in two previous novels Brautigan has toyed with popular forms, this time he resorts to the most hackneyed of pretentious literary devices: the self-conscious, self-lacerating author/protagonist and his novel within a novel.

Actually, the self-laceration is not without interest. A feature of Brautigan's novels has been charming, but finally unconvincing love affairs with pliant young women who are always very pretty and always good in bed. On occasion the affairs have been sad or have failed, and last time there was even a tragic one (out of two); this time, however, the relationship is what you'd expect of a man who imagines women so pliant—candidly exploitative and neurotic. It is also entirely the fault of his "very well-known American humorist" whom Brautigan dissects with a fine, cruel hand.

Meanwhile, the novel within the novel—in which a surrealistic detail, a frigid sombrero, precipitates a disastrous mob action that takes thousands of lives—is so gratuitously nihilistic that Kurt Vonnegut takes on the weight of the prophet Jeremiah by comparison. Mob action indeed. Does this pessimistic turn merely reflect the derangement of his lovelorn protagonist? Or does it also reflect the way Brautigan feels about the hordes of young people who read his books? One senses yet another artist who feels defeated by his audience and longs for simpler times. And one wishes to remind him that times were never that simple, and that the audience is out there affecting your life whether you acknowledge it or not.

Clay,1976

"Stetson Stunts"
Carolyn Clay
Boston Phoenix, 21 Sep. 1976, pp. 15, 23.
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Beneath the golden arches of Richard Brautigan's imagination, Mark Twain and Tim Leary might meet for a burger. In Brautigan's droll, truncated "novels" (Trout Fishing in America, The Abortion, The Hawkline Monster) surreal whimsy and violence coalesce in junk-culture. Sombrero Fallout, about the heartbreak of an American humorist and what happens when an ice-cold sombrero drops like a heavenly bomb into the seemingly calm of the heartland, is marked by the old Brautigan charm and the old Brautigan tricks, the plethora of bizarre, precious imagery that delights the stoned. Brautigan's consciousness remains as all-accomodating as over-taxed elastic. Like Mary Hartman's, his frame of reference includes no scheme of graduated importance: mayhem, lost love and the mercury level in tuna fish are examined with the same curious detachment and articulated with the same whacked-out logic.

Though talented, Brautigan tends to sell himself cheap. He dreams one apt, if peculiar metaphor, then amplifies it to even great absurdity—but not, thankfully, past the threshold of tedium. Like Kurt Vonnegut's, Brautigan's charm likes not in his thinking—which is often banal—but in his style. Certainly the syntax is unique: "She was never going out with another writer . . . . They were like having a vacuum cleaner around that broke all the time and only Einstein could fix it. She wanted her next lover to be a broom." Brautigan shuffles odd imagery with chatty reflections on the mundane. The amalgam is intriguing: "Despair suddenly fried his brain into thousands of pieces of dancing bacon"; "His cousin looked as if he had been slapped across the face by a shark"; "He tried to banish the tuna fish sandwich from his mind but it refused to leave. It clung there like a barnacle to an Ethiopian battleship."

Like tuna fish, art apparently has a mind of its own. It is around this Unamunesque precept that Sombrero Fallout is wrapped. A very neurotic American humorist (Brautigan?), rendered a blubbering basketcase by the departure of his Japanese love, begins work on a strange sci-fi tale about a gelid sombrero that swoops down on a tiny town, landing at the feet of its mayor, his politically ambitious cousin, and an unemployed person desperate for a job and/or a hamburger. It is "10:15 in November" when the writer reaches "into the typewriter as if he were an undertaker zipping up the fly of a dead man" and removes his sombrero scribblings. He shreds the paper and deposits it in the wastebasket where the crumbled pieces proliferate and the sombrero incident mushrooms.

Incapacitated by his Armour Star despair, the writer spends a reverential hour fondling an Oriental hair found in the sink. (Since the Japanese woman left him a month ago, one shudders at the humorist's housekeeping habits.) While he agonizes over what to eat and whether to call his love, screw a stewardess or just snap out of it, the Eastern beauty, with midnight hair of which her black cat seems a suburb, sleeps but blocks away, dreaming of Kyoto or Seattle. And in the wastebasket the small town goes berserk, the discovery of the sombrero resulting eventually, if not coherently, in armed insurrection against the United States government. Clearly the humorist's feelings of impotence and his helpless suffering are somehow assuaged by the bloody action-saga in the trash. Beyond that, the uprising seems intended as a tongue-in-cheek political cartoon. War cliches and the rhetoric of statesmanship abound.

Sombrero Fallout is an amusing but slight fantasy—unless, of course, one is stoned enough to start interpreting the hieroglyphics on Oreos. Incidentally, after the revolution and the President's effort "to heal the nation's wounds," the mysterious sombrero inexplicably changes hue and the American humorist pours his heartbreak into a C & W ditty. Far out.

Cüpper,2003

"Less Is More or Less: Richard Brautigan: Willard and His Bowling Trophies—A Perverse Mystery, Sombrero Fallout—A Japanese Novel"
Mélanie Cüpper
Bulletin de l'Association des Germanistes diplômés de l'Université de Liège, no. 15, March 2003, p. ***?***.
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The visuality, fragmentary arrangements, narratorial hopelessness, and cacophonic simplicity of Richard Brautigan's Willard and his Bowling Trophies and Sombrero Fallout, render both texts comparable not only in their structures and stylistic fast-foodism, but also in the themes which they address. While recognizing the influence and effect of consumer goods, food and American mass culture, the growth of technology and changes in the perception of reality, both novels identify the psychological difficulties in establishing (authorial) individuality in a fragmented world. Focusing on minimalist concerns for the near-at-hand, the domestic, the unexceptional, and the unpretentious, Brautigan, the writer of discontinuity and juxtaposition, aims at the enunciation of problematical and temporary truths while saying a minimum rather than a maximum: in his fiction, there is a constant vacillation between the maximalism of being and the minimalism of everyday life.

Willard and Sombrero are (meta)narratives, ordinary and transcendent at once. Willard is a novel full of sketches, a well-balanced mixture of erotic narrative and detective novel, where Anacreon is quoted while the door is kicked in; this Perverse Mystery is a collage of the hazardous interaction of the lives of two neighbouring couples and that of the picaresque Logan brothers. Sombrero is a literary triptych made up of the humorist's life, a Japanese dream and the story of a town; this Japanese Novel is the narration of a humorist's internal and a town's external conflict and the general progressive loss of proportion.

The subtitles A Perverse Mystery and A Japanese Novel express the author's wish to present his texts as if they were written in accordance with certain established conventions of genre; academically ignored, however, Brautigan's (pop)ular fiction remains mysterious, and to some extent genre-less; a vacuum of interpretation is left to be filled by a diversity of means, ranging from Marxist and Freudian thought to Adornoism and Hegelian dialectics up to visual art aesthetics and the author/text ("readerly") and text/reader ("writerly") relationships. Sombrero and Willard challenge not only the notion of the writer's or the reader's role, the idea of authorial control versus collaborative creation, but also the classification of the epistemological identity of the narration and its objects. Are they synoptic, analytic, or panoptic?

Like Brautigan's texts, my study employs a wide network of surface (main text) and depth (footnotes) to interconnect divergent ideas: Schopenhauer's Platonic disclosure is juxtaposed with Barthes' theories of myth and Debordian Situationism; there is a sombrero, some bowling trophies, a papier-mâché bird and lots of food, which is associated with the sex appeal of the (in)organic and examined from a number of recent theoretical perspectives including Lyotard's and Jameson's definition of postmodernism, while the whole leans towards semiotic fetishism, and Baudrillard's and Eco's descriptions of the hyperreal in American post-culturalism.

Stewart,1978

"Sombrero Fallout, A Japanese Novel"
Joan Hinde Stewart
Magill's Literary Annual. Edited by Frank N. Magill. NJ: Salem Press, 1978, p. 785.
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Author: Richard Brautigan (1933- )
Publisher: Simon and Schuster (New York). 187 pp. $6.95
Type of work: Novel
Time: The present
Locale: San Francisco and a small town in the Southwest

An American humorist tries to come to grips with the loss of his Japanese girl friend; and a sombrero falls from the sky in a small town in America, eventually leading to riots bloodshed, and mayhem.

The best thing about Richard Brautigan's new novel may well be the cover like the original hardback, the paperback edition bears the design of a reclining Japanese woman and an alluring cat whose sumptuous hair and feline beauty reproduce and extend her own. Juxtaposed with the predominantly green design, the purple lettering of the title, Sombrero Fallout, promises whimsy as well as complexity. "Fallout" conjures up visions of the aftermath of a nuclear holocaust, while its inexplicable pairing with "sombrero," and the latter's connotations of the mores of Spanish America and the American Southwest startle and mystify. The adjective of the subtitle, A Japanese Novel, both hints at an extension of the fallout theme (Pearl Harbor) and suggests the necessity of a reinterpretation of "sombrero": does it carry here its obsolete meaning of an Oriental parasol, rather than, or in addition to, the more common one of a high-crowned, broad-brimmed Mexican hat?

The novel proper, wherein these various allusions are elucidated in a generally more straightforward fashion than one might have anticipated, begins in a manner not altogether direct: it inscribes itself in a certain modern tradition of fiction—that of the novel which functions as a reflection on itself. This particular quality is owing, in Sombrero Fallout, first of all to the presence of the author, or someone rather like him, as character: the central figure bears no name, only the epithet "an American humorist." Like Brautigan himself, who authored more than half a dozen collections of poetry and as many novels before the present work, the American humorist writes "books" and has achieved fame. He is initially engaged here precisely in composing a story about a sombrero falling out of the clear blue sky for no apparent reason and landing on Main Street, in front of the mayor, his cousin, and an unemployed man. The work begins in fact with quotation marks. for its opening sentences are being written at the typewriter of the American humorist. Before the first chapter's end, the author of the sombrero story has decided against continuing it, and has carefully torn up the paper into little pieces: capriciously destroyed, then, is everything we have just read about the sombrero. Eight tiny chapters later, we return to the almost empty wastepaper basket containing those scraps of paper. They seem, to the American humorist, to have a life of their own. In fact, they decide to do just that: to have a life of their own, to go on without him.

The story of the sombrero falling out of the sky in a hot and sleepy town, then, will tell itself as the reader reads it. It is now a text entirely independent of its maker, a story ostensibly without a teller. The device of the independent text is not new, of course, but it still captivates. And as the bizarre tale evolves, the American humorist, completely separated from his aborted but still viable novel, continues prey to his own grief: his Japanese girl friend of two years has recently left him. The resulting frustration and loneliness are what impair his creativity. Two stories (apparently related only in that he who initiated the one is the chief protagonist in the other) henceforth keep pace: the recital of the snowballing events in the little sombrero town and the account of the desolate lover trying to kill an evening at home.

First the more sentimental of the two. After succumbing to tears and demolishing the first paragraphs of his story at about 10:15 P.M., our American humorist, forlorn, heartsick, worried, intermittently hungry, sulks and mopes about his apartment. He decides against going out for a hamburger (just yesterday he ate two burgers; it's too soon for another), reconnoiters the refrigerator and kitchen cabinets for eggs (knowing full well he never keeps any), considers his inordinate liking for tuna fish sandwiches with mayonnaise and his inviolable resolve to consume no more of them (tuna contains higher than normal levels of mercury), telephones an old girl friend and immediately calls her back to cancel. He is obsessed with thoughts of his Japanese ex-mistress, recalling how they met (in a bar), how she had read his books and knew who he was, how he took her home and fumbled putting the key in the lock, how they slept together that first night. (He may be clumsy, lacking in humor, and not especially handsome, but he's an exceedingly good lover; that's why the girl—very exacting on that particular score—stayed with him so long in spite of he reservations.)

Yukiko, meanwhile, is sleeping peacefully sixteen blocks away in a suburb of San Francisco, infinitely relieved to be rid at last of her insecure and neurotic companion. Next time she won't choose an author: they require too much emotional upkeep. She dreams to the purring of her black cat, dreams of her adored dead father, who committed suicide and is buried in Japan; she dreams and her hair dreams too—it dreams of being carefully combed in the morning. In her dreams there is an umbrella purchased for her in Japan (an Oriental umbrella, therefore—a sombrero?). Yukiko, in fact, sleeps through the entire novel—whose fictional time covers, admittedly, only a little over an hour. One wonders why the artist portrayed her as open-eyed on the cover. While she sleeps, the American humorist almost goes mad when he finds, then loses, then finds once again, a single strand of long, black Japanese hair. At 11:15 he is sitting with a tight grasp on the recovered strand of precious hair and singing a Country-Western song of his own spontaneous invention, about loving a Japanese woman: "She's my little lady from Japan."

"Meanwhile back in the wastepaper basket," the tale of the misplaced size 7 1/4 sombrero perpetuates itself. At the mayor's behest, his cousin reaches to pick it up and instantly recoils: the hat is ice-cold. Political aspirations come into play (the cousin would dearly like to be mayor someday) and he begins crying uncontrollably—like the humorist himself, whose cheeks have known a steady stream of tears since Yukiko's departure a month earlier. A crowd gathers and within a short time the curious crowd is a rioting crowd. The mayor goes mad, and arms himself along with the rest of the populace; the governor is called in, but killed en route to the scene. The town is under siege. The National Guard, and then the President of the United States himself, must intervene. War correspondent Norman Mailer arrives and demonstrates remarkable courage and perseverance in covering his story.

If the two tales which constitute the novel are themselves somewhat vapid, their conjunction is provocative and confers on them more meaning than either would have alone. Thus the distress of the American humorist both precipitates and parallels the chaos in Main Street; the death and destruction which have the wastebasket as their theater are emblematic of his own private desolation. The stories organize themselves around a series of pairs or oppositions: bathos and frenzy; heat (the temperature of the town) and cold (the sombrero); hats and umbrellas; East and West; Asian calm (Yukiko is not only taciturn by nature, she is in addition a psychiatrist by profession) and Caucasian volubility; restful and restoring sleep (the woman's, the cat's) and frantic wakefulness (the humorist's); spontaneous generation (the sombrero story) and spontaneous effacement (Yukiko's dreams); hunger (the mayor's companion's, the humorist's) and satiety (the cat's).

The evocation of Norman Mailer at the scene of the riots is perhaps typical of the kind of parody and fantasy for which Brautigan won himself a sizable public a decade ago. Whether the events are familiar or outrageous, his tone remains casual, and Brautigan affects in general to use only simple declarative sentences. There are without any doubt some delightful images (the American humorist's worries are trained white mice scurrying after him, with voices more forceful than those of the Mormon Tabernacle Choir) and some amusingly absurd speculation (does the right eye or the left start crying first?).

But on the whole it is difficult to see why his style has been described as poetic. One need look no further than the reviews quoted on the back cover of the paperback edition for examples of such pronunciations: Sombrero Fallout is adjudged to be not merely intricate and subtle, it is "poetry written as prose," and "structural like a prose poem" (whatever that means). Where can this poetry reside? Surely the rather silly device of repeatedly indenting for each of a succession of short declarative sentences ("The cat jumped into bed." New paragraph. "The cat lay down beside her." New paragraph. "The cat did a moment's methodical cleaning of its front paws." New paragraph. "The cat used its tongue...."), so that the passage contains as many paragraphs as sentences, does not suffice to constitute poetry. Nor, certainly, can expressions which are elliptical to the point of being only marginally intelligible ("she had lost the dimensions of her existence and what she wanted out of life") be thereby qualified as "poetic." Nor, finally, does the occasional gratuitous suppression of punctuation and syntax make for poetry in prose. Brautigan is, moreover, infuriatingly repetitious: many of the eighty-five extremely short chapters (some of them a mere four or five lines, and each sporting a one-word title which accentuates the effect of brevity) begin by recapitulating what has taken place in previous chapters. Each successive movement of the novel thus involves a contraction before the expansion, so that in spite of its occupying only 187 pages, it produces at times the impression of being agonizingly slow-paced.

This new novel—where the inspiration is not always in evidence, where the fictional devices are sometimes both blatantly factitious and rather hackneyed, and where the asides are occasionally downright sophomoric ("Interesting that this fact had not been brought up until now")—seems unlikely to make many converts for its author. But those who are already sensitive to the appeal of Brautigan will doubtless enjoy Sombrero Fallout. It is as droll, as unconventional, as understated. as eccentric as his previous works. and it affords in places the undeniable pleasure of recognition—recognition of familiar though unwonted attitudes, of minuscule feelings and of frames of mind which the reader has experienced, though of which he may have had only a threshold awareness.