Jubilee Hitchhiker

June 11, 2012
Bookended by harrowing accounts of poet and author Richard Brautigan's 1984 suicide, Hjortsberg's meticulously detailed biography of the writer is a study in excess, both in terms of Brautigan's life and Hjortsberg's page count. Described by one friend as "a painfully shy young man who tried everything in the world to cover up his shyness with a veneer of cool reserve," the man behind Trout Fishing in America struggled with an inferiority complex that gave way to haughtiness as his star rose, accompanied in equal measure by juvenile behavior that often resulted in shattered furniture, limbs, and friendships. Brautigan begged to be arrested as a teenager and was granted his wish as well as a stint in a mental health facility where he underwent shock therapy. But Hjortsberg (Alp) doesn't dwell so much on Brautigan's mental state as on the minutiae of the author's lifeâthe number of fish caught on a given expedition, the airlines he flew, and dinner tabs are covered in detail, making the book feel as if it was written by an accountant rather than a novelist. Hjortsberg, who was a neighbor of Brautigan's in Montana and spent 20 years compiling the book, offers glimmers of insight into the author, but they're buried beneath acres of plodding procedural prose. Readers with an abiding interest in Brautigan will find this a thorough portrait of the man, but those new to his work will likely pack up and head home long before the journey's end. Photos.

Starred review from April 1, 2012
It's not uncommon for a biography to begin with the subject's death, but Hjortsberg's account of Richard Brautigan's suicide, in 1984, at age 49, is jolting in its explicitness, a foretaste of the fervency of this all-embracing portrait of the author of such era-defining works as Trout Fishing in America (1967) and The Pill versus the Springhill Mine Disaster (1968). Hjortsberg (Nevermore, 1994) knew Brautigan and spent 20 years conducting revelatory interviews and gathering the visceral details that make this an exceptionally intimate, vital, meticulous, and involving biography and anecdotal chronicle of the West Coast literary counterculture. Brautigan never knew his father and lived a life of grinding poverty in Washington and Oregon with his scrappy mother and various stepfathers, picking fruit, fishing, idolizing Hemingway, and writing. After surviving a breakdown, incarceration, and electroshock treatments, Brautigan hitchhiked to San Francisco in 1956 and began the hard labor of transforming himself from a shy and awkward country bumpkin into a cutting-edge writer and iconic eccentric. Hjortsberg delves incisively into Brautigan's volatile friendships and doomed marriages, struggles to get published, leeriness of fame, heavy drinking, and increasingly disturbing behavior, concluding that Brautigan, for all the wit and whimsy of his work, was forever haunted by the bleakness of his childhood. A prodigious work of scholarship, remembrance, and empathy.(Reprinted with permission of Booklist, copyright 2012, American Library Association.)