[Brautigan's writing seems to float easily away from the dreck of the contemporary environment] like clouds over the Pacific…. Although his work is indeed extremely funny, there is a pervasive sense of loss, desolation and death in it which amounts to an implicit formulation of an attitude towards contemporary America. The first word of his first novel, A Confederate General from Big Sur …, is 'attrition', and the book manages to combine fleeting reminiscences of the obvious attritions of the Civil War with the less obvious attritions of life on the Californian coast today. The book is the reverse of didactic, and one would be missing the whole point to look for a specific moral to it. In appearance indeed it is very carefree. (p. 406)

And yet one feels that the engaging humour, naive and fantastic, is being maintained on the edge of a great emptiness…. The narrator offers...