Cookie Baking in America

THE ABORTION: AN HISTORICAL ROMANCE 1966 by Richard Brautigan. 226 pages. Simon & Schuster. $5.95.

Here is the author of Trout Fishing In America again, a trout in each pocket, picking watermelons off the overhanging branches. What to make of him? The best dodge may be to declare genius and withdraw, but this is not so easily accomplished.

"His stuff's too easy."

"It's nice, though."

"But it really is too easy."

"Yes, but very nice."

The skull-bound argument iterates, and there is no resolving it. For the half-beguiled, half-annoyed, unyoung straight reader, Richard Brautigan's gentle, shaggy little books have in them much of what is both very nice and too easy about the kid culture: its music, its mobility, its sex, the milder varieties of its pharmaceutical voyaging. Brautigan, at 36 an honorary kid, floats through his books on pure talent. If he does not seem to work very hard at his writing, well, they repealed the Protestant ethic after all and insouciance is one of his major attractions. His new book, for instance, is a warm, wobbly tale about a reclusive young man who works in San Francisco in a library for unpublishable books. It is Brautigan's happy idea that life's losers, an astonishing number of whom seem to be writers, can bring their mad, lame manuscripts to this library, where they will be welcomed, registered and placed lovingly on shelves. The books will not be read, but they will be cherished. The need for such a library is evident in the librarian hero's sampling of books received:

"The Stereo and God, by the Reverend Lincoln Lincoln. The author said that God was keeping his eye on our stereophonic phonograph. I don't know what he meant by that, but he slammed the book down very hard on the desk.

"Pancake Pretty, by Barbara Jones. The author was seven years old and wearing a pretty white dress. 'This book is about a pancake,' she said.

"Bacon Death, by Marsha Paterson. The author was a totally nondescript young woman except for a look of anguish on her face. She handed me this fantastically greasy book and fled."

There was not much plot in Brautigan's 1967 bestseller, Trout Fishing In America, or In Watermelon Sugar (1968), which were not so much novels as paper bags full of disassociated whimsy. By contrast, The Abortion has a real story. The heroine is Vida, who brings a manuscript to the library one night. Her book is about her gorgeous body, in which she feels uncomfortable. The hero makes her feel comfortable. They live together in the back of the library, and she bakes chocolate cookies, which the hero gives to old ladies who bring manuscripts at three in the morning. It is all very pleasant. Then Vida gets pregnant, pleasantly, and the two of them go to Tijuana and find a pleasant abortionist. When they return to San Francisco, someone has taken the hero's place in the library, but he does not mind and the book is over. It was very nice of Brautigan to write it and of Simon & Schuster to print it, and at the end, for some reason, the reader feels nice too.

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