Audiobook Review
The Hawkline Monster (1974)
by Richard Brautigan
Richard Brautigan's literary career is a real rags-to-riches-to-drinking yourself to death 20th century tale. Brautigan started out as a Bay Area poet publishing at the end of the 1950's to little critical or commercial acclaim. He struck mass-market and critical success at the exact same time with his back-to-back novels, Trout Fishing in America and In Watermelon Sugar in 1967 and 1968. Brautigan was well positioned to capitalize on the aftermath of the summer of love with an already established publishing history (and publisher). Unfortunately, the zeitgeist moved on and Brautigan, like many of the artists who achieved popular success in the 60's and post-60's era, faced questions of authenticity and relevance, and his commercial success guaranteed that critics would abound. His two hits set him up, but he never stopped publishing.
I heard about The Hawkline Monster from a random Instagram account which featured a slide show of alt-westerns. I was intrigued, and became more intrigued when I saw that someone had made an Audiobook for this 1974 novel for the first time in 2016. Anyway, I listened to the Audiobook via the Libby library app and I liked that the whole run time was four hours (216 pages long in print). Listening to the Audiobook, it seemed like maybe history (and certainly contemporary critics) had been a little cruel to Brautigan- I went and read the New York Times review for the print edition and it was kill yourself awful. I can see a real direct connection between the tail end of the hippy period- which was dismissed, as this novel was dismissed, as silly and inconsequential, and some of the thematic preoccupations of postmodernist, who were already well underway in the mid 1970's.
There seems to be a parallel to the way that disco music was written out of the history of electronic music because it wasn't cool, even though it was undoubtedly electronic music.
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