Preview of Trout Fishing in America Summary:

Trout Fishing in America is not a didactic book. Although it portrays an America of victims, a society with an endless capacity to transform beauty into saleable commodities, a world scarred by the decay and death of spirit, the book does not promote a program of reform. There is no hope of melioration, for the book's underlying philosophy, derived largely from Zen Buddhist thought, holds that life is repetitive and essentially determined.

Such a view leaves no room for heroism and sees social progress as illusory. Brautigan's distrust of collective enterprise sets him apart from both the socially conscious writers of the 1930s and the hippies of the 1960s. Trout Fishing in America, like A Confederate General from Bug Sur (1964), suggests that any communal effort is futile. For Brautigan, social activism is supplanted by the individual imagination's effort to maintain and defend a vision of America, "often only...