I want to talk out my feelings about Richard Brautigan's Trout Fishing in America—about Brautigan's sense of life and about his politics. Because his politics are those of lots of my own people, maybe sometimes of my own life—and they disturb me.

Brautigan is talking … to the WE of a subculture—a subculture I'm a part of. He is creating for us a mental space called Trout Fishing in America where we can all live in freedom. He's not preaching about it to us: he assumes we're already there, or just about there. But I'm also in an unfree America, not by mental choice but by condition. And the politics of imagination is finally not enough for me. It's not enough for us. (p. 56)

[The critic proceeds to quote from the chapter "The Cleveland Wrecking Yard."] The view I'm offered at the Cleveland Wrecking Yard's window...