The attitude of general acceptance that pervades Trout Fishing in America and Brautigan's democratic use of diverse cultural materials hearkens back to Walt Whitman, but Brautigan does not share Whitman's optimism.

His most immediate influences are the Beat writers of the late 1950s: Lawrence Ferlinghetti, Jack Kerouac, Allen Ginsberg, and Gary Snyder. Through them he is profoundly influenced by Zen Buddhism and the compressed vision of the haiku as written by Japanese masters such as Basho (1644-1694). The wit of Basho, who when challenged to write a haiku that mentioned the famous eight views of Omi, simply described the sound of the temple bell at Mii-dera in a thick mist that hid the other "views," becomes the whimsy of Brautigan, who "always wanted to write a book that ended with the word Mayonnaise."

Trout Fishing in America can be profitably read as an ironic companion to...