Trout Fishing in America is more of a collection if anecdotes than a story. There's a few recurring situations like Braughtigan's childhood and a camping trip with his girlfriend and their daughter, but there is no running plot from one chapter to another. This is more of a collection of short essays rather a novel or short stories.
What essays they are! Braughtigan writes with such wit and creativity, jumping from garden path sentences to wordplay and sarcasm and everything in between. This book is fifty ish years old, originally written and released in the 60s, but the writing is so clever and intricate it feels completely fresh. It's not just a funny book, there is meaning in each of these chapters, sometimes theres an obvious moral or point to them, sometimes it is hidden below layers of surrealism or ordinary-ness.
I supppse you are wondering where the fishing comes in. It's everywhere. The phrase Trout Fishing in America pops up all over the place with lots of different meanings. It's a person's name in one chapter, it's Hotel Trout Fishing in America, it's a wanted criminal, it's a culture and an ideal and all manner of abstract concepts. It makes the book bizarre, with straightforward phrase taking on so many different forms. It's a cool effect. It makes Trout Fishing in America feel like some sort of ever present phantom, shapeshifting into whatever it needs to be. It's the only thread that holds the whole book together, and it is holding tight.
This is a great, weird book. It feels truly of the 60's - it is counterculture right down to its core. Its like if Captain Beefheart's Trout Mask Replica was a book - strange and noisy but ultimately just great. Awful nonsense if you don't get it, fantastic if you do. This book is essential 20th Century American literature, and deserves to be held in high regard, but for some reason it has faded to obscurity. Definitely worth a look.
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