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 t...

In the following excerpt from his short study of Brautigan, Boyer discusses the ways in which Trout Fishing in America is an attempt to transcend reality through the use of the imagination.

In [Trout Fishing in America] the trout stream is a central metaphor for the shrinking American wilderness and the social values which are associated with it. The narrator of Brautigan's novel seeks a pastoral life in nature but does not succeed; his search ends in frustration and disillusionment. Enroute he comments upon social and personal values in America with an equal sense of despair. Brautigan's method, looking at society through nature, is not new. A number of literary artists and phil...

One difficulty in reviewing Brautigan's books is that you're tempted to try to do in your own prose what he does in his. He makes it look so easy…. Many reviewers have tried to do that, & of course they can't. But I don't even want to review Trout Fishing in America. I just want you to read it because it is one of the funniest books you will ever read, a book you may not want to read on the bus to work because it will keep you laughing out loud & everyone else on t...

Of an order apart from most books, "Trout Fishing in America" was a totally original novel plotted in the changing shapes of a heart-breaking symbol for what is happening to America. "Trout Fishing in America" was a legless wino, a cheap hotel, a revolutionary slogan chalked on the backs of schoolchildren; it was the political disguise of the murderous "Mayor of the Twentieth Century"; it was a brooding spirit that remembered "people with three-cornered hats ...

Richard Brautigan's novels are as informal as an open house—everyone and everything is welcome. (p. 54) "Trout Fishing in America" is not a book for the sportsman to get hooked on. Brautigan is an outdoorsman, but far out. His work abounds with wildlife, but not of the Field and Stream variety. A compleat angler, Brautigan drops his lines into a clear pool of consciousness, and reels in some very strange fish.

Richard Brautigan … the only writer of the sixties recommended to me by students whom I enjoyed, [is] author of the charming Trout Fishing in America, and author, alas, of The Hawkline Monster, which is decidedly uncharming and literary, obvious, empty, Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid stuff…. There are maybe a hundred [edgeless and pointless] chapters in The Hawkline Monster…. When Brautigan tires of gunmen he writes about identical women named Miss Hawkline whose father made a monst...

[Trout Fishing in America] has been around for a while, enjoying some underground success. It's really about trout fishing in America. There's something of Hemingway, but also of Izaak Walton in this small compendium of anecdotes, observations, a few recipes. Brautigan can write whimsy that, miraculously, is neither cute nor embrassing. Trout Fishing is a funny, delightful book that draws freely on American mythic attitudes, the tones and rhythms of drifting, searching out trout streams, think...