[For this year’s
installment of my annual
Beach Reads series, I wanted to revisit favorites from different stages of
my life, all of which would make for fun additions to your summer bookbag.
Share your nominations for Beach Reads for a crowd-sourced weekend post that
doesn’t mind some sand between the pages!]
On one of
the books that greatly expanded my sense of what literature can be and do.
It’s not
at the top of the list of the
reasons why Mr. Heartwell was my favorite and most influential English teacher, but it
sure didn’t hurt: he had a large and full bookshelf at the corner of his room
from which students were welcome to pick out and borrow any books they wanted. Both
of my parents had bookshelves like that too—I’m pretty sure I first encountered
David
Bradley’s The Chaneysville Incident (1981),
also in high school, by pulling it off of a shelf of my Mom’s—but there’s
something about a totally unexplored shelf, you know? A whole new frontier,
waiting for this budding literary pioneer to follow his own Oregon Trail and
find untapped rivers of gold from which to—okay, shelving the metaphor. In any
case, it was a great resource, and one of the books I pulled from that shelf
that made a significant impression was Richard Brautigan’s Trout Fishing in America (1967).
By this
time I had encountered plenty of stylistically innovative and experimental
authors and works, but there was still something about Brautigan’s book that,
to quote Emily
Dickinson’s definition of poetry, made me “feel physically as if the
top of my head were taken off.” To be honest, I had no idea what I was getting
into and not much more of an idea what to make of it once I did—per the above
link, one of Brautigan’s rejections from a publisher remarked with confusion
that “I gather from the reports that it was not about trout fishing,” and I
know how he or she felt—but I know that there was something compelling,
irresistible even, about that state of reading. As with many experimental
texts, it’s difficult to describe adequately or sufficiently the book’s style
and voice; but this short sample chapter, “A Walden
Pond for Winos,” is a good place to start. The mix of realism
and poetry (or at least a poetic sentiment); the dark humor and yet shared
humanity; the balance of the narrator’s individual voice and a more communal
set of experiences and identities; the fact that the chapter has precious
little to do with trout fishing, or even with those that come before and after
it, demanding that we create a sense of structure ourselves since he’s damend
if he’s going to do it for us—all key elements to Brautigan’s style and novel.
I don’t
want to misrepresent my relationship to Brautigan’s novel—I haven’t touched it
since that high school reading, and have thought more about it in the time I’ve
been writing this post than I had in most of those intervening years—but the
fact remains that when I was brainstorming which high school-era book to highlight,
it was the first one that came to mind. And the reason, again, is quite simple
but very significant: it wasn’t like anything else I had read. I was a pretty
well-read kid, across many different genres and eras and traditions—but I was
still a high school kid, and as such had that delightful teenage combination of
ignorance and yet a certainty that I knew what was what. Brautigan’s was one of
the books that reminded me how much I had yet to experience and learn, how much more
than was in heaven and earth than I had dreamt of in my philosophy (we read Hamlet that year too). A pretty valuable
lesson, and one that has helped carry me forward into an AmericanStudier’s life
of continual learning and growth.
Next Beach Read
tomorrow,
Ben
PS. What do you
think? Other Beach Reads you’d nominate?
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