Sleep With the (Trout) Fishes
My father gave me this copy of Dreaming of Babylon along with a few other Brautigan books, as he knows I’m a fan, my disappointment in An Unfortunate Woman notwithstanding. He told me that he thought it was an early novel, before Brautigan got into being poetical and eccentric. Imagine my delight to find out that this was his second-to-last novel, one of his attempts to put his spin on genre writing.
Therefore, Dreaming is delightfully whimsical as it takes on the voice of “hard-boiled” private eye C. Card. Card is a protagonist who seems to have little going on for himself. He’s broke, behind on his rent, and doesn’t even have any bullets in his gun. His friends and his mother wish he would give up the private eye silliness and get a real job. But in addition to his delusions of grandeur in real life he dreams of a life in Babylon as a private investigator three thousand years ago. It’s all rather pathetic, but Card remains likable. The story weaves around and doesn’t make a lot of sense, but it’s never meant to. Like a river in the plains, it goes back and forth and back and forth and eventually ends up somewhere pretty much like where it started.
Brautigan based the novel in San Francisco, and somehow his attention to environment grounds the story. When he describes the Hall of Justice — “It’s a huge, tomb-like gloomy-looking building and inside it always smells like rotten marble” — well, there I am flashing back to jury duty in 1999. It isn’t his attention to detail, but his subtle instinct for the right detail on which a lot of imagination can be hung. Some writers will give all the detail you’ll ever need to force an environment while others will just tell some bare facts and assume that you can figure it out on your own. Brautigan paints around the edges and never draws the lines between the dots, but gives the reader enough consistency that the worldor at least the citylives and breathes around the story.
All that said, Dreaming was pretty insubstantial. It was a nice ride, full of the matter-of-fact silliness that Brautigan is so good at, but it lacks in depth and theme. This is was a formal exercise for Brautigan and it never goes very far beyond its formalism.
I’m not sure that my father knew that he was handing me a first edition. Pretty cool!
