Trout Fishing in America is a unique and unconventional book that intertwines tales of trout fishing with reflections on American society in the 1960s. The narrative style is fragmented, mixing prose poetry with fictional autobiography, creating a surreal and dreamlike reading experience. The book explores themes of nature, countercultural critique, and the collision of frontier archetypes with market consumerism, all presented with humor and sarcasm.
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Sensitive Topics/Content Warnings
Content warnings include medium levels of existential themes, mental health struggles, and critiques of consumerism.
From The Publisher:
Richard Brautigan was a literary idol of the 1960s and 1970s whose comic genius and iconoclastic vision of American life caught the imagination of young people everywhere. He came of age during the Haight-Ashbury period and has been called "the last of the Beats." His early books became required reading for the hip generation, and on its publication Trout Fishing in America became an international bestseller. An indescribable romp, the novel is best summed up in one word: mayonnaise.
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Can one be alienated and at home at the same time? Can we love something so very deeply even when we are not sure it exists? Can we contain not only multitudes but opposites and contradictions, optimism and grief?
Brautigan’s “Trout Fishing in America” is a ramble about our relationship with our culture and the earth itself. Brautigan, who composes Trout Fishing from a series of tidy yet absurd vignettes, gives us a sometimes silly, sometimes incisive, sometimes melancholy discourse on nature and society in America. His America, our America, is a place of majesty and mass marketing, of serene streams filled with steelhead and rainbow trout, and of marketers selling those same rivers, bugs, and waterfalls out of a backlot by the foot.
Trout Fishing in America is about trout fishing, well not really, more about being connected with nature and nature providing. It is about coming to a river and catching your limit. And it is also about “Trout Fishing in America,” a symbol of the elaborate stage-set simulacrum of America where cowboys stride mightily and statues remind us what we are supposed to stand for. We are men of the mountains, rugged and individual, even as we seek to pave, turf, and monetize that very splendor.
The themes in Trout Fishing are very contemporary - alienation, exploitation, and the almost bipolar obsession that America has with revering and annihilating the natural world. We are men (and women) who (re)move mountains.
I live in Mill Valley, a town mentioned in the book, and you can still catch the scent of Brautigan’s world here if you close your eyes and listen deeply. The beauty is still there, especially as you drive over the mountain, a beauty that transfixes folks from the Pacific Northwest, as the author was. It is a beauty barely saved by the people of the '60s and '70s who understood that the earth was a source of power and wisdom, not solely a resource to be marketed and depleted.
Fishing in America has a minor focus on statues, particularly Ben Franklin’s in a park in San Francisco. I have long had a fascination with statues because they are so arbitrary. They are rarely art and seem to be manifestations, bookmarks in bronze and stone to remember what we are supposed to think. Statues aren’t. They represent things, but only least which the actual person (or personification) they are modeled on. They are out of date instantly, and in the best case become ironic.
So too with “Trout Fishing in America,” the character and the book. Both represent something lost, something that may have been true (or may not). It is odd and purposefully inscrutable but not dishonest.
Those who want a straightforward narrative, clear exposition, and conventional place and time will be deeply frustrated because Brautigan does not care. He cares about the America of wild rivers and streams, and whether you respond to it or not is more about the you that comes to this story than the story itself, or the storyteller.
What can you read after
Trout Fishing in America?
About the Author:
Richard Brautigan (1935-1984) was a god of the counterculture and the author of ten novels, nine volumes of poetry, and a collection of short stories.
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