Brautigan's work in both poetry and prose … provides a post-modernist instance of primitivist poetics in as pure a form as one could wish and also helps to clarify some of the differences between modernism and post-modernism in general. (p. 52)

As a poet and maker of fiction, Brautigan seems to come as close to a painter like Grandma Moses as it is possible for a writer to do; though sometimes his allegorical intentions and utopian or pastoral politics suggest a greater affinity with the early nineteenth-century Quaker and primitivist painter of a long series of variations on the theme of the Peaceable Kingdom, Edward Hicks. Insofar as his prose books can be considered novels, they are a re-invention of the novel, a project carried out in seeming ignorance of the history of literature and representing a kind of childhood of fiction, personal to the point of self-indulgence, open-ended, radically...