I gave away my copy of this book a long time ago and don’t have too clear a memory of the contents beyond the title story, but I wanted to write this review because Revenge of the Lawn is my all-time favorite short story, and that means it beats out some incredible pieces by Chekhov, Twain, Thurber and all the rest. It is a masterpiece of a story, pure perfection. It’s laugh-out-loud hilarious and yet leaves you feeling a bit wistful and melancholy.

Brautigan’s writing is lyrical. In many of his works the meaning of his words is not explicit, but serve to create images and impressions rather than clear narrative. His writing can be abstract and nebulous. What would you expect, after all, from an author who names a character Trout Fishing in America? But that’s not the case in this story. The eccentric-sounding title turns out to make perfect sense. It’s a down-to-earth tale, grounded in historical context, that anyone can follow.

And yet it’s not so easy to say what the story is about. The focus shifts from his grandmother to his grandfather, to his grandmother’s boyfriend, Jack, to a gaggle of drunk geese and ends up in a completely different place from where it started. In the end, the story seems mostly about an early memory and an attempt (very successful!) to reconstruct the people and incidents responsible for it.

Nothing I can say will do justice to Brautigan’s own words, so I’ll end with an extract from the story:

My grandfather was a minor Washington mystic who in 1911 prophesied the exact date when World War I would start: June 28, 1914, but it had been too much for him. He never got to enjoy the fruit of his labor because they had to put him away in 1913 and he spent seventeen years in the state insane asylum believing he was a child and it was actually May 3, 1872.

He believed that he was six years old and it was a cloudy day about to rain and his mother was baking a chocolate cake. It stayed May 3, 1872 for my grandfather until he died in 1930. It took seventeen years for that chocolate cake to be baked.

There was a photograph of my grandfather. I look a great deal like him. The only difference being that I am over six feet tall and he was not quite five feet tall. He had a dark idea that being so short, so close to the earth and his lawn would help to prophesy the exact date when World War I would start.

It was a shame that the war started without him. If only he could have held back his childhood for another year, avoided that chocolate cake, all of his dreams would have come true.