"...her car window drifted effortlessly down like the neck of a transparent swan."

and another will say

"A fog was building up over the ocean. It was not building up like a shack but like a Grand Hotel. Soon ... everything would be lost in flocks of vaporous bellboys."

Hundreds of these tags. But under the plain, deep and ominous, sometimes even bumping up against the surface, rages The American Civil War, the real one. A lost Confederate general, so scared he hears himself calling out his own name, "running through the casual but chess-like deaths in the Wilderness." A headlike corpse. Upstairs and downstairs. Marijuana smoke and cannon smoke. As the Poet sings: "A punctured lung, and the band plays on." The perfect Setup.

Without warning and without fear, you and Richard Brautigan come sliding along in a cute old plane without wings or buttons or anything. You stare down and cannot speak. He smiles and you can't remember how you got here and don't care. You move along, laughing to yourself every so often, even WOWing at some Good Ones. It's all very simple. "The Fullness of Living." "Oatmeal sticks to your ribs." Then there's a scene with a guy who can't quite Make It with a girl and it looks like a nice place to end. ("Got to get back to my homework, anyway.") But WHAM! The time-tape stops! Rewind. A NEW end. Rewind. ANOTHER end. and another and another ... until there is No End, only a voice from the dolls droning "nothing ... we're nothing ... you're nothing ..." Then, suddenly, there's no sound at all and you drop back, exhausted and drenched.   Sincerely,   Helgruth

III. TROUT FISHING IN AMERICA

I is for the Indian feasts you put in my sleep at night,

N is for the noxious gas that swims in your earthly light   --ancient Dutch hymn

* * * *

The word "in" is of the utmost significance, for this novel. Without it, or a word that looked like it, it's title would have been Trout Fishing America. Trout Fishing America would have worked awhile for Sports Illustrated, maybe made the cover-story once or twice, then left. As he would have put it, "There's no future in it." I can see him now, stumbling down some New York sidewalk in a second-hand overcoat. Then one windy November day, he would have been corrupted by a tiny, lithping Lithuanian and become "Trout Fishing American." He would have become a slick, glossy Layman-Informer. It's not a pretty story.

This has to be the only case on record of a title having a book. Under your very eyes, Brautigan meets his title, chats with it, performs an autopsy on it, gives it a splendid dinner with Maria Callas, and even composes a ballet for it. I, for one, cannot explain this strange state of affairs. Who can explain it? Can Bertrand Russell?

I think part of the problem is that few people realize the enormous importance of titles in the crazy, mixed-up, wonderful world of ours. Why, titles are the most neglected things next to Lima, Peru. Just try and imagine someone who wants to write a book called "Dog" or "Arm." He DOESN'T want it to be called "Dog or Arm." He simply wants his title to be "Dog" OR "Arm." What can he do? Perhaps you are beginning to see my point.

(I might mention in passing that Trout Fishing in America is basically a collection of snapshots of author, wife, and title traipsing around the country, and that it is the most sensitive portrayal of warm, wet garbage in the U.S. that has ever been written.)

I think that a New York Times Book Review advertisement for Trout Fishing in America should have this somewhere in it:

IF YOU ARE AFRAID of witnessing the death of an eleven-inch trout by port wine