The Hawkline Monster Recap

I finished Richard Brautigan’s The Hawkline Monster some time back and have been procrastinating writing a review of it. It’s a fantastic piece of literature and I want to share my impressions, but I’ve been struggling to find the right words that capture how and why I like it so much.

It was written by a poet and it shows. The use of imagery is magnificent and it’s very efficient in its use of words. The narrative is at different times dark, whimsical, gritty, humorous, intelligent and coarse. Despite that, the voice is steady an evenly paced. I have been guilty of grossly misjudging the tastes the general public before, but I expect this book would have appeal to a very broad audience. It is wildly imaginative, cleverly written, and heavy handed with the sex. Although there is a lot of implied violence, there are virtually no scenes of brutality or aggression. The few instances of bloodshed are not enough to make the plot feel heavy.

I don’t think The Hawkline Monster would be considered magical realism, though I think it is a cousin of the genre. It made me think of some Kurt Vonnegut novels in that way. Vonnegut routinely blends aliens and metaphysics into a story that is otherwise about normal people and events. I’m thinking about Slaughterhouse Five, Timequake and Cat’s Cradle specifically. Brautigan has the same ability to blend the extraordinary with the commonplace in a way that seems so effortless. And like Vonnegut, when Brautigan goes to the unusual he does not do it in half measures. The bizarre elements are glaringly bizarre. The weirdness is at a level where it is completely unmoored from reality. It is like neither author has put a moments worth of thought into trying to make their creation believable. The Chemicals that are central to the suspense in The Hawkline Monster are some kind of rogue experiment that plays psychic tricks on people, can shrink a corpse, make clothes disappear and may have eaten a dog. The Chemicals somehow have consciousness and complex motivations. There is no effort made to try to explain The Chemicals in any scientific manner. The only clue to what The Chemicals might be is that they potentially hold the solution to the greatest problem facing mankind. Normally, I am very unforgiving of literature that does a sloppy job trying to make fictitious science believable, but in the case of Brautigan (and Vonnegut) I accept it. I enjoy it even. It works. The Chemicals are an abstraction, any effort to try to ground them to the physical world is only going to distract from the true meat of the story.

To this point in this review, I have done very little to recount the story. That is an intentional omission. The Hawkline Monster is billed as a gothic western. The description captures it perfectly. The setting is Oregon at the turn of the century. A couple of hired guns are recruited by a mysterious woman to kill a monster that lives beneath her house. There isn’t much more I can say about the story that would benefit a potential reader. I think this is a book that really should be experienced on a personal level. My specific impressions could only ruin someone else’s enjoyment I would think. You need to read it an draw your own conclusions. Quite honestly, I do not feel too confident in my ability to present any more of the plot correctly even if I wanted to. I’m sure I did not absorb all the nuance on a single read. There are parts of the narrative that seem to contradict other parts, but I think the defect lies in my comprehension, not the writing. I need to revisit again sometime down the road, perhaps not right away. There are three or four books that I have read in my life that I am really looking forward to returning to again when I am an old man. The Hawkline Monster has made that list.