Changes

Of all 62 stories this is my favourite: Ghost Children of Tacoma. It's about three pages long and it recalls childhood games of fighter pilots and bombs and casualties and faceless enemies against a grown-up backdrop of the shock attack of Pearl Harbour and the subsequent entry of the United States into World War II:

I like Ghost Children of Tacoma best for its sticky, sweet warmth and its evocation of a time and a place in childhood recalled with wry but obvious affection; a time and a place where adult voices are but distant echos in a child's world of fantasy, imagination and acting games. I like it also for the deliberately child-like, short and direct sentences: to me they sound like the blunt voice of truth tempered with innocence and decorated with perfect comic timing. And of course I like it because, hiding behind the ways of children and the voice of a nostalgic adult, there is pithy comment on war and the way war reduces human lives to lists; lists of weaponry and armouries, lists of casualties and deaths. Stories told like that; those that hold inside them an altogether accurate satire made without vitriol but with a gentle, ever-so-slightly-spikey humour hold more resonance for me than could ever a hundred air-punching pieces of shouted rhetoric.

I loved Coffee which talks about the loneliness of being between love affairs, the way sexual intimacy and loving closeness vanish so quickly with the break up of a relationship and describes perfectly the solitary coldness which follows. Shortly after comes I Was Trying to Describe You to Someone which is beautiful in its enthusiasm for new, fresh love and the joy and optimism it brings. Oh, have another little quote, because it's a lovely one:

There's the funny but rather savage indictment of the misuse of a continent, Carthage Sink, in which Carthage is a bombastic river whose trout would rather die than swim in it, Elmira about a dream-journey into a childhood place and the resonant, almost mythic pull of its memory, there is a fabulous dig at the square peg round hole ways of the world as people try to bury a tired lion in their backyard, there are bears, dressed and sitting in the front seats of trucks, and there is Mr Henley, laughably able to get credit because he is already in debt, with the shadow of a bird, the symbol and the chain of his new debt, nailed to him by a filing cabinet blacksmith. And Cameron who was once young and dangerous but is old now, and whose chair has taken on his spirit:

I'm giving it all away, so I'll stop telling and quoting now. That child-like style and accurate but sweet, passive humour pervade all the stories in Revenge of the Lawn and yes, on occasion the comic timing breaks down, leaving the tone perhaps overly manneristic and a little contrived, silly even. It's only once or twice though, and it doesn't really matter because another, better, wee little story lies ahead with just the turn of a page. Like many of those beat boys (yes, even the gay ones), Brautigan's view of women has a tad of schoolboy misogyny about it, but benignly so, and it isn't really anything more than a vague irritation. Also, in a beaty kind of way, there are maybe a few too many images of doors, maybe a dozen or so scattered throughout the book, not a huge number but enough to grate a little. They had a thing about doors in those days of the sixties, didn't they? These are minor niggles, however, in comparison to the gift of the happy hours of the afternoon I spent reading Revenge of the Lawn and to the way that the book is still in my bag so that I can go back to my favourite parts when I'm in need of a smile, or two, or three.