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Funny you should mention Brautigan -- my favorite novel of his is In Watermelon Sugar, but The Abortion is also fine -- because as I was reading this essay I was thinking how much more fractured and messed up the contemporary poetry scene is. Would that poets only had to contend with a straw devil like Robbe-Grillet! I was supposed to read one of his brief novels in college, but couldn't get through it. Not because it was difficult -- it was boring.
Brautigan was also a poet and prize student of Jack Spicer, a really fine "poet's poet" that not even many poets read or appreciate. Brautigan's novels are wonderful because they're not really novels, they're wild and funny and definitely not boring. Experimental in the best sense of the word -- without paradigmatic rules or stacks of theory more interesting than they are. As someone who enjoys both forms (prose and poetry), I hope that more readers pick up on writers like this who actively blend genres and blur boundaries. Mitchell is good -- though Cloud Atlas is by far his best -- and another, not mentioned here, is recent Nat. Book Award winner Nathaniel Mackey.
