"He was a gentle, troubled, deeply odd guy."
So tells us the writer Thomas McGuane, describing his late friend, Richard Brautigan, who died in 1984 in Bolinas, California.
The fact his death was self-inflicted with a .44 Magnum to the head covers off the “troubled” part of that description.
The work he left behind takes care of the “gentle” and “deeply odd.”
But the gentleness is essential here.
We’re all deeply odd. But to be gentle, generally, is a quality that seems to have gone out of fashion with that mad-ass Jesus dude.
Yet, having just finished reading Brautigan’s 1968 novel, In Watermelon Sugar, as soon as I saw that quote from McGuane, I realised it was the exact word I was grasping for.
It is a very gentle novel.
I was—and still am—struggling to figure out how to describe the book beyond that.
The truth is, I can’t.
It is—like McGuane says of Brautigan himself—deeply odd.
Might be better to describe how I felt while reading it:
Safe.
Reassured.
Full of wonder.
Perplexed.
Melancholy.
Happy.
Sad.
Confused.
Hopeful.
Intrigued.
I had a feeling too that there was a deeper truth just out of view, somewhere behind the words, an answer that would unlock some kind of higher knowledge. But rather than searching too hard to find it, something in the writing tells you to relax. Don’t force it, a gentle voice whispers, just let it be.
A bit hippyish, I suppose. Though Brautigan hated hippies. Ironically, then, he is an icon of ‘60s counterculture and more prosaic descriptions of In Watermelon Sugar suggest that’s what it’s all about—a commune, the rejection of violence, peace & love, and so on.
Maybe.
It is very zen. There is a Buddhist vibe here, Shintoism possibly, an Eastern influence. And though he was big in the US for a while (and has later become somewhat of a cool kids’ cult icon), he’s always been especially popular in Japan. I can see why—In Watermelon Sugar has more in common with The Woman in the Dunes by Kōbō Abe than For Whom the Bell Tolls or The Great Gatsby.
Whatever the fuck this book is, I fancy Brautigan would have preferred us not to overthink it.
If you start to do that with something as odd and—frankly—magical as this book, it begins to ruin it. If you question how everything can be made out of watermelon sugar and the sun be a different colour each day thus influencing the colour of the watermelons grown that day… like I say, you ain’t going to be happy with the answers.
It’s weird.
And we should just let it be so.
Should I mention Harry Styles?
Probably.
You might know Baby Jagger has a famous song, which he says is named after the book. However, it has nothing to do with the book. The book was just lying around the studio when the young Styles saw it and, to quote the sage himself, “thought it looked cool,” so he used the refrain.
(The original Mick Jagger probably would have read the book and made the lyrics about the deeper truth about life Brautigan was searching for and that would have been cool. Sadly we live in times where it’s enough to just have things look cool on the surface. Ah well.)
Now “watermelon sugar” is a euphemism for something else entirely. Sorry, Richard.
But anyway, enough of Styles, that cheeky culturally appropriating yet fashionable scamp.
It’s a gentle book.
It’s a deeply odd book.
It’s a short book.
And for those reasons, I recommend it.
His more famous novel, Trout Fishing in America is where people usually begin as far as I can tell. That might well be a stronger, more complete book—I’ll find out. But as far as unexpected and strange reading experiences go, stumbling into In Watermelon Sugar and not quite knowing what the hell is going on or where it’s going to take you, is an experience I can get behind.
My recommendation: Take a blanket and a beer (or something more illegal) and find a good spot in a wide-open park where you can sit for an afternoon and read this in a single sitting as if it were a parable being told to you by a hippy Jesus just coming down from an eye-opening trip on mushrooms.