SOURCE: Hume, Kathryn. “Brautigan's Psychomachia.” Mosaic 34, no. 1 (March 2001): 75-92.

In the following essay, Hume analyzes the aesthetics of Brautigan's narratives, noting that he consciously used Zen principles to evoke a special kind of reader response.

Richard Brautigan's novels rouse readerly uneasiness. Now accustomed to the gigantism of Don DeLillo's Underworld and David Foster Wallace's Infinite Jest, we wonder whether slender books can offer anything but wispy charm. The violent emotional substrate is also disquieting, tainted ex post facto by the author's suicide. Add to that the strangeness: Brautigan offers no authorial guidance on how we should respond to a trout stream described as a series of horizontal telephone booths. Is this a bizarrely accurate simile, or does it physicalize the metaphor of wilderness being commodified and reshaped by technology?

The current critical picture reflects our difficulties. In addition to readings of individual novels, we have many attempts to...