You need to read this book.

Richard Brautigan is one of the greatest writers and poets to come out of the United States in the last hundred years. For me, he is a master of the child-like wonder voice that tells stories with spot-on telling detail, a raw emotional tilt that is at once wise and naïve, and an imagination that will always keep you entertained and guessing.

He’s a child of the late 60’s. Considered to be on the tail end of the Beat Generation, Brautigan spent a good amount of his time in San Francisco, writing and living the writer’s life. By the end of his life he split time between Tokyo and a ranch in Montana, before shooting himself in the head with a shotgun.
In Watermelon Sugar has a first paragraph that makes you want to just sit around sipping lemonade and reciting it to people who walk by your front porch- I have done basically this to strangers on the street, at impromptu poetry readings in the neighborhood I live in, and am known to convince people to listen to me slur it when I’m, um…, really tired.

“In Watermelon sugar the deeds were done and done again as my life is done in watermelon sugar. I will tell you about it because I am here and you are distant. Wherever we are we must do the best that we can, for we have so far to travel, and there is nothing to travel except watermelon sugar. I hope this works out.”

Swoon. Recite it at your next family gathering and just go from there. Where Brautigan goes from there is a near-future post-apocalyptic tale involving him and a woman he is in love with living at a small shack in a tweaked utopian community he refers to as iDeath (this is pre-Apple and it is fascinating now to think about the new connections that come with this happenstance of naming relating to the modern iEverything of Apple).

The story is written with beautiful language and a simple plot. There is the commune where they all live, and there is the faraway ruins where no one goes anymore. There is the examination of the promises of communal living, the simple joys of a simple life, and a lot of loving going on between the two (this is the 70’s we are talking about here).

There’s no real moral to the story and I walk away everytime feeling like I just woke up from a wonderful dream- like I drank some whiskey with my brunch and fell asleep on the porch out front or in the hammock and had one of those beautiful afternoon siesta dreams that never end and you can’t remember what it was like before you had the dream.

One commenter on one of his books said that in the future people will not write novels, they will write Brautigans because the form he uses is so innovative. Like I said, you need to read this book.

Photo Credit: nathalie.cone (via Flickr under CCL)