In Watermelon Sugar (1968)

Richard Brautigan was one of my literary infatuations in the '70s out of high school. By the time he died in 1984, taking his own life, I was sad to hear it but already had misgivings about reading him again and didn't. I'm not surprised to find, all these years later, that In Watermelon Sugar seems meager now. Maybe I should have tried his more famous Trout Fishing in America first, but In Watermelon Sugar was my favorite when I was reading all his stories and poems. It has bobbed up and down in vogue due to a Harry Styles hit song last year, "Watermelon Sugar," which was indeed inspired by this novel. There's also a 2006 Neko Case song inspired by it, "Margaret vs. Pauline." Brautigan, like Neko Case but not Harry Styles, was a native of Tacoma, Washington. He was born in 1935 and his folks fought a lot and roamed the Pacific Northwest with him growing up in impoverished and unstable circumstances. In the '60s he showed up in the Bay Area and created a literary niche for himself as a winsome elfin bard inside the hippie ecosystem. His stuff is marked by surreal not to say nonsensical whimsy, which is gentle as a general rule but sometimes it's off and often there's decidedly a dated sexual politics. His girlfriends and his kinda-sorta girlfriends were often on the covers of his books. The novel is easy and quick to read because everything is short, with lots of white space on the pages. It barely breaks 100 pages. The far future depicted is closer to fantasy than science fiction but even closer to daffy hippie undulations that too often verge on insipid. His metaphors and analogies seem more trite now where they once seemed inspired. Everything in this world is made of watermelon sugar, pine boards, stone, and trout oil. I know for certain what two of those things are. The sun shines a different color every day, and the watermelon sugar reflects the color of the day it was harvested, or planted, or something. One day of the week the sun is black and there is no sound; ditto the products made with those watermelon sugars. I don't know what watermelon sugar is but the place sounds pleasant anyway. The narrator has two girlfriends: Pauline and Margaret. The scene is either polyamory or the narrator is a creep or both. Pauline is basically wonderful and Margaret is not, though it's not clear why for either. It looks a lot like stark old-fashioned midcentury male chauvinism and this narrator now looks dunderheaded at best, sadly. There are some silly villains as well but the novel is hamstrung by the fatuous narrator, who never gets better. The whimsy never says die, I will say that for it. The whimsy never says die.

In case the library is closed due to pandemic.