As a newcomer to the Brautigan cult, I can only think that [Dreaming of Babylon] must be a bit of a spare-time exercise: an after-dinner conversational joke which got out of hand….

Much of the action takes place in the morgue, the cemetery, or the hero's head; either way, the effect is fairly deadly. Brautigan's style depends on the premise that one bad joke deserves another: he sets up what starts off as a respectable one-liner and then kills it stone dead by trying to make it into two. If he'd honed down the cracks, the book would be even shorter than it is, but much funnier. There is not much point in parodying a style unless there is a valid alternative statement to make: this is just a thin idea, made thinner by the disparity between the master's theme and the pupil's variations. (p. 24)

Mary Hope, in...