Of an order apart from most books, "Trout Fishing in America" was a totally original novel plotted in the changing shapes of a heart-breaking symbol for what is happening to America. "Trout Fishing in America" was a legless wino, a cheap hotel, a revolutionary slogan chalked on the backs of schoolchildren; it was the political disguise of the murderous "Mayor of the Twentieth Century"; it was a brooding spirit that remembered "people with three-cornered hats fishing in the dawn" and Lewis and Clark discovering the Great Falls of the Missouri. It was dead, extinct as the dinosaur (trout had become steel, streams had become stores), but seemed to live, transformed again, in the life and prose and person of Brautigan himself. Every chapter had a secret hook to set, a steel meaning in a sparely tied fly of anecdote and metaphor, a valuable and accurate surprise. Just another...