Times Book Review(© 1970 by The New York Times Company; reprinted by permission), February 15, 1970, p. 49.

I would give a dollar to know what is going on in Richard Brautigan's head while he writes his epigrammatic poems. They read like an urban renewal of an amalgamation of Zen Buddhism, William Carlos Williams, and the stoned comic strips of R. Crumb; they are as provokingly puzzling as any poetry I know. In Brautigan's prose (the fine [Trout Fishing in America], for instance) this naïve metaphysical clownishness can create a truly profound vision of our spiritual environment, but his verse, here as elsewhere, never develops any real solidity…. But at times Brautigan's crazy metaphors do work, creating a new perception of reality that is at once comic and poignant. And even when he is bad, he is his own man, and interesting.

Virginia Quarterly Review, Autumn, 1970, p. cxxxiv.

Richard Brautigan's several novels and books of poems, most of which have been praised by reviewers like Herbert Gold and John Ciardi, are now being widely read in the campuses across the United States. Brautigan probably deserves popularity, for he has a lot going for him. He writes a terse, readable prose that often seems the output of an extremely hip computer that has been programmed with the styles of Hemingway, McGuffey's Reader, and the Berkeley Barb. His postage-stamp chapters allow for fast reading and a lot of skipping around—no mean virtues in the age of McLuhan. His unconventional wisdom distils many disparate things now in the heads of Woodstock generation: Brautigan "gets it all together" and is plugged in to the vibrations of the day. But whether, as Ciardi claims, "Brautigan manages effects the English novel has never produced before" is another matter. His prose often slips into a primer flatness … and his philosophy is sometimes sophomoric and pretentious. In Watermelon Sugar, Brautigan's science-fiction projection of the future, is overly "sweet" in most senses of the word, and the realms of iDEATH and inBOIL seem either too vague or too personal to take on genuine parabolic significance. Perhaps the most serious criticism that one can direct against Brautigan is that his novels lack structural design, that they are random observations and experiences strung together with cute chapter titles and little overall unity….

Trout Fishing in America … is first of all the autobiography of a societal drop-out, a contemporary hipster's progress from Jack Armstrong to Jerry Rubin. Trout fishing as a central metaphor becomes especially poignant in our current age of ecology, an age when America's fish and wildlife are rapidly being obliterated. Like the trout, the narrator is the victim of a technological world that cares little about him and his kind. Again like the trout, whose watery and insubstantial world creates the boundaries of its own reality, the narrator creates his own world in Mill Valley…. The novel … becomes a picaresque tale of a somewhat funky narrator, a modern Don Quixote, who is on the road searching for the romantic ideals of his childhood and for the genuinely human. What he discovers is a series of disenchantments….

Trout Fishing in America … is a hipster's view of America's square-world ethics, societal goals founded on achievement, wealth, and success—the whole Ben-Franklin syndrome. The central metaphor of the novel, trout fishing, implies through its associations the abundance, the richness, the good life that is every American's supposed birthright and the achievement of which is every American's dream. But Brautigan's view is from down under, from that of a societal freak who spends his days at San Francisco's Walden Pond for Winos and finds consolation in fantasy, art, and the pleasure of merely circulating. He has discovered what Alonso Hagen found almost seventy years before. Trout Fishing in America is a fraud, at best a chronicle of loss, frustration, and despair….

Granting the enthusiasm for flora and fauna, wildlife and isolation, Trout Fishing in America seems a pessimistic book. No joyous hymns to the seasons, no genuine celebration of nature's wonders—only a sense of waste and unnatural death, as in the account of the trout that dies from a drink of port wine….

Trout Fishing in America is a solid achievement in structure, significance, and narrative technique. For all its surface peculiarity, moreover, the book is centrally located within a major tradition of the American novel—the romance—and is conditioned by Brautigan's concern with the bankrupt ideals of the American past. Its seemingly loose and episodic narrative, its penchant for the marvelous and unusual, its pastoral nostalgia—all of these things give it that sense of "disconnected and uncontrolled experience" which Richard Chase finds essential to the romance-novel. Brautigan's offhand manner and sense of comic disproportion give to the narrative an extravagance and implausability more suited to the fishing yarn and tall-tale than to realistic fiction. Lying just below the comic exuberance of the book, furthermore, is the myth of the American Adam, the ideal of the New World Eden that haunts American fiction from Cooper to the present. The narrator of Trout Fishing in America is Leatherstocking perishing on the virgin land that once offered unbounded possibility, modern man longing for the restoration of the agrarian simplicity of pioneer America. That a life of frontier innocence is no longer possible adds to the desperate tone and comic absurdity of the narrator's frustrated excursions into the American wilderness.

Kenneth Seib, "Trout Fishing in America: Brautigan's Funky Fishing Yarn," in Critique: Studies in Modern Fiction, Vol. XIII, No. 2, 1971, pp. 63-71.

Only Richard Brautigan could write so lyrically of the healing force of ice in the blood, or the quirky peace of the supercool. From the brilliant novels, [Trout Fishing in America] and [In Watermelon Sugar] to this first collection, [Revenge of the Lawn: Stories 1962–1970], Brautigan has written sublimely of the way misery can turn into a joke, or anguish into a deadpan anecdote. For all Brautigan's characters are trout fishermen fishing for cool, freezing away every psychic ache, or looking for that cold, hard alloy Brautigan calls "trout steel." "Imagine Pittsburgh," Brautigan asks in [Trout Fishing in America], made out of trout steel, "the clear snow-filled river acting as foundry and heat." For Brautigan is the prophet of cities built out of ice rather than fire, of an America whose emblem would be no war-god eagle, but an elusive cold fish….

Brautigan always writes of deadpan children, of the little corporals, of the luckless fishermen at life. But they can alchemize themselves into trout people and live with steely passions and diluted hopes. Brautigan makes cutting out your heart the only way to endure, the most beautiful way to protest the fact that life can be an endless down. [Revenge of the Lawn] is not Brautigan's best book. But it has the Brautigan magic—the verbal wildness, the emptiness, the passive force of people who have gone beyond winning or losing to an absolute poetry of survival.

Josephine Hendin, in New York Times Book Review (© 1972 by The New York Times Company; reprinted by permission), January 16, 1972, pp. 7, 22.