So the Wind Won't Blow It All Away by Richard Brautigan

First published: 1982

Type of work: Psychological realism

Themes: Emotions and death

Time of work: The 1940’s and August 1, 1979

Recommended Ages: 15-18

Locale: Western Oregon

Principal Characters:

• The Boy, the narrator, who tells his story from the perspective of the man he becomes
• A Couple, a man and woman who reconstruct their living room on the shore of a small pond where they fish every night
• A sawmill Watchman, a middle-aged alcoholic man, who gives the boy his empty beer bottles
• A Recluse, an eccentric, much feared by other children but whom the boy befriends
• The boy’s Mother, an emotionally crippled woman, who merely tolerates her son
• David, the popular, talented, and intelligent boy who is accidentally shot by the narrator

The Story

So the Wind Won’t Blow It All Away is an absurd and nostalgic narrative of youth, imagination, and the end of innocence. The tale is an attempt by the narrator, an unidentified man, to come to terms with a shooting accident that occurred when he was twelve years old, an incident that has become the medium through which the narrator interprets his life.

Although the narrator writes from the present, the story is a series of jumbled flashbacks which interrupt the main plot, set on a summer evening in 1947, when the narrator, who is twelve, waits for a man and a woman to arrive at a local pond. Each evening, the couple has arrived in a pickup truck loaded with furniture which they then set up at water’s edge to reconstruct a fully furnished parlor, complete with electric lamps that have been converted to kerosene. The couple habitually prepare a meal on their woodstove and spend the evening eating their dinner and fishing from their sofa.

While he is waiting for the couple, the boy visits an alcoholic sawmill watchman and, later, an old recluse who lives in a shack near the pond; both are isolated characters whose mysterious pasts intrigue the boy. Yet, as if walking to visit each of these characters again as an adult, the narrator also indulges in a series of flashbacks similar to the daydreams of youth. Many of these flashbacks focus on the narrator’s prolonged fascination with the deaths of children: The reader is informed of the secret viewing of a child’s funeral when the narrator is five years old, of the later death of a boyhood chum in a freak auto accident, and of a neighbor girl who succumbs to pneumonia. Other flashbacks detail the narrator’s childhood loneliness and his dysfunctional relationship with his emotionally distant mother.

In one flashback, which foretells the emotional wreckage wrought by the shooting, the narrator tells how, in a childish attempt at self-therapy, he becomes obsessed with the hamburger he realizes he should have bought with the same money he spent on a box of bullets, one of which kills his young friend, David. The only character in the novel who is ever identified by name, David is a very popular, talented boy who befriends the narrator in secret because David is somewhat ashamed to be seen with him. Yet the narrator is the only person in whom David can confide his nameless dread of a vague future event. Toting his rifle and the newly purchased bullets, the narrator makes a rendezvous with David, who also packs a rifle. They bicycle together to an abandoned orchard to shoot rotten apples. While the boys are separated, David shoots at a pheasant but misses. Reflexively, the narrator also shoots at the pheasant, but he misses badly. As he soon discovers, his wide shot has mortally wounded David.

Despite a court acquittal, the incident leads to such social censure that the narrator’s mother, who has finally found work as a waitress, is forced to move her family to a distant location. There, to save his sanity, the boy focuses obsessively on the hamburger which, he feels, would have saved him. Had he spent his money on the hamburger he craved when he bought the hollow-nosed .22 bullets, he would have spared himself unfathomable guilt and pain. With only the slightest awareness of her son’s regret at not having bought a hamburger instead of the bullets, his mother acknowledges that indeed he should have bought the hamburger. The next day, the boy is able to end his obsession and burn the copious notes he has amassed in research on hamburgers throughout his long battle to save his sanity.

Finally, the narrator explains, he is able to release from his memory the man and woman who arrive in their pickup truck to fish at the pond on that summer evening months before the shooting. While the boy watches, they establish their living room and cook their supper, mourning loved ones they have lost. As the evening progresses, the narrator finds himself diminishing, “getting smaller and smaller...and more unnoticed...until I disappeared into the 32 years that have passed since then. . . .”

Context

So the Wind Won’t Blow It All Away is Richard Brautigan’s last published novel. Two years after the book’s appearance, its author committed suicide. The least successful of his published works, it sold fewer than fifteen thousand copies and was taken lightly, if not largely ignored, by the critics, in part because the book appears to be without the cynical humor of Brautigan’s earlier fiction, notably Trout Fishing in America (1967) and In Watermelon Sugar (1968). Yet, So the Wind Won’t Blow It All Away is quite similar to Brautigan’s earlier novels in its anecdotal, conversational style; its use of eccentric characters; and its themes of escape. Like Brautigan’s other late novel, The Tokyo-Montana Express (1980), So the Wind Won’t Blow It All Away presents a darker rendering of Brautigan’s earlier theme that the imagination provides a healthy escape from an unbearable reality. As the narrator is forced to relive interminable sequences of action leading to the shooting of his friend David, memory is a prison for the boy-become-a-man.

So the Wind Won’t Blow It All Away is the first of Brautigan’s works that is not directly engaged with American frontier dreams, except as these are posed through a youth spoiled by one fatal bullet. Also unique to the book is Brautigan’s broad and valuable use of autobiographical experience. In part, the book recaptures much of Brautigan’s nomadic and poverty-stricken childhood in Washington and Oregon with his mother, Lula Mary Keho Brautigan.

Brautigan’s earlier works were widely popular, particularly with collegiate audiences. Many critics have suggested that by the time of publication of So the Wind Won’t Blow It All Away in 1982, Brautigan’s original audience had grown disenchanted with his style and themes, all of which had seemed so characteristic of the 1960’s counterculture movement. Others, such as Edward Halsey Foster and Marc Chenetier, propose that Brautigan has been too quickly dismissed by critics and audiences alike. Despite its small audience and mixed reviews, So the Wind Won’t Blow It All Away retains interest for those readers who seek a better understanding of an unconventional writer and his distinctive body of works.

Bibliography

Barber, John F. Richard Brautigan: An Annotated Bibliography. Jefferson, N.C.: McFarland, 1990.

Bradbury, Malcolm. The Modern American Novel. Oxford, England: Oxford University Press, 1983.

Brautigan, Ianthe. You Can’t Catch Death: A Daughter’s Memoir. New York: St. Martin’s Press, 2001.

Ch netier, Marc. Richard Brautigan. New York: Methuen, 1983.

Foster, Edward Halsey. Richard Brautigan. Boston: Twayne, 1983.

Iftekharuddin, Farhat. “The New Aesthetics in Brautigan’s Revenge of the Lawn: Stories 1962-1970.” In Creative and Critical Approaches to the Short Story, edited by Noel Harold Kaylor. Lewiston, Ky.: Edwin Mellen Press, 1997.

Keeler, Greg. Waltzing with the Captain: Remembering Richard Brautigan. Boise, Idaho : Limberlost Press, 2004.

Mills, Joseph. Reading Richard Brautigan’s “Trout Fishing in America.” Boise, Idaho: Boise State University Press, 1998.

Seymore, James. “Author Richard Brautigan Apparently Takes His Own Life, But He Leaves a Rich Legacy.” People Weekly 22 (November 12, 1984): 40-41.

Stull, William L. “Richard Brautigan’s Trout Fishing in America: Notes of a Native Son.” American Literature 56 (March, 1984): 69-80.

Wright, Lawrence. “The Life and Death of Richard Brautigan.” Rolling Stone (April 11, 1985): 29.