In Watermelon Sugar – Richard Brautigan

Dell
1968
When I was in the 5th Year (the equivalent of 10th grade in the States), I had a most excellent English teacher called Mr. Arbon. Our class was a bit above the usual, personally selected in the 4th for “advanced studies” and so were only about 15 in total. Twice during the year, Mr. Arbon would assign a book report, and choose individual books for all of us. The first time I was given Catcher in the Rye and the second time it was Richard Brautigan’s Trout Fishing in America. Imagine writing a book report on that–I was too busy picking up bits of my blown mind to really write a report of any coherence, though I did respond by writing my own Brautigan-inspired short stories. Mr. Arbon then lent me all the other Brautigan books he owned, which was nearly all of them, but not quite.
In Watermelon Sugar was one of the missing, and I only read it recently. It’s a thin book, just over 100 pages, and took me most of a day to read. How does Brautigan fare now? Well, I like him just fine, actually.
The story of “In Watermelon Sugar” describes a writer living in a sort of “new Eden”-like commune, a town called Watermelon Sugar, which also processes watermelons for all sorts of fantastical things. There is the main gathering place, called iDeath, and a villain of sorts, inBOIL, who represents the old ways. It’s a novel of dualities–Watermelon Sugar is both a place and a thing; the location is both wilderness and city; it is finite and infinite. There are two women the writer gets involved with, one who goes astray and one who doesn’t. There is a joy of life about the inhabitants, but death is a constant presence.
Brautigan’s style is at times close to Japanese haiku in its economy of language and the jumps it makes line to line.
Over time Brautigan came to symbolize the hippy movement to many, and the idyllic nature of this novel suggests why–a glimpse of a downhome utopia threaded through with a gentle surrealism borne of the American forest. It’s sort of my spiritual home.
By the way, there’s a much better essay on the novel, which unearths its Christian mythos over at the Brautigan archive. There’s also a more recent musing on the name of iDeath in an era of iPods and iMacs. Finally, here’s a sample of the first few pages.