Brautigan's latest is a spoof of [Dashiell] Hammett, [Raymond] Chandler, et al.: a period detective piece that takes place in the San Francisco of 1942. His down-on-his-luck detective, C. Card, is in such desperate shape that he has to borrow bullets. Give the odd anachronism, the imitation is not bad but the resultant mix is more like a parody than sincere imitation; the whimsy is, by now, getting as tiresome as sixties' cant; and the fallback upon subplot, a device Brautigan seems to wish to patent, is without apparent aim. It is time someone gave the Brautigan turntable a kick; it is beginning to stick in a most familiar groove. Forgettable fun; an exercise for the children of Evelyn Wood.

The year of the belles-lettres detective (Berger's Villanova, Feiffer's Ackroyd) finds unpredictable Richard Brautigan at his very breeziest—inside the mind of C. Card, the worst shamus in 1942 San Francisco, bereft of clients, cash, and companionship: "It's hard to find people to kiss when you haven't got any money in your pocket and you're as big a fuckup as I am." Today, however, there's a prospective client to meet, if only Card can avoid his rent-seeking landlady, scrounge bullets for his gun, and resit the delicious temptation to daydream of Nebuchadnezzar's Babylon ("just like a song playing on th radio in my mind"), where he stages such comic-strip adventures as Smith Smith Versus the Shadow Robots. Serendipity strikes—"Bullets for my gun! Five dollars! And best of all, a dead landlady!"—and the elegant, blond, beer-guzzling client hires Card to steal a murdered hooker's body from the morgue; this would be dandy if she hadn't also hired some gun-toting thugs to snatch the same cadaver and some razor-wielding blacks to ambush Card on his way to the 1:00 a.am. cemetery rendezvous. Neither parody nor genre re-creation, this cartwheeling fantasy is more like a sentimental comic book without the pictures—the Babylonian pipedreams and occasional Brautiganian whimsies ("As I walked along, I pretended that I had a prefrontal lobotomy") do their tricks without keeping C. Card from getting where he's going, which is nowhere. As a result, the deceptively simple sentences, the two-page chapters, and the surface amusements generate about the fastest 220 pages you'll ever read—leaving lots of extra time to wonder what, if anything, it all meant.

Even in 1942, with the ablebodied competition away at war, C. Card is the most unsuccessful private eye in San Francisco. His ineptness dates back to when he was beaned by a baseball and subsequently found himself dreaming of Babylon—quite unimaginative dreams, of playing ball in 596 B.C. or running a detective agency near the Hanging Gardens. Then a paying client appears on the scene—a rich beer-drinking blonde in a chauffeured Cadillack who offers Card $1000 to seal a body from the morgue. It takes him a while to get organized and find bullets for his gun, but eventually he hits the morgue, where he finds other people have been hired by the blonde to nab the same body. Confusion, car chases, and a final ambiguous scene with Card's mother at the cemetary. Brautigan tells his whimsical little tale in dozens of short chapters that will add up to something meaningful to those initiated into Brautigan land and lore.

Richard Brautigan's Dreaming of Babylon is a short comedy-thriller, made even shorter by being divided into some 80 three-page chapters, thus leaving plenty of white space throughout. It is also thin—an attenuated tale of wartime San Francisco, where a luckless medically unfit private eye commissioned to steal a corpse from the morgue is continually hindered by his day-dreaming fantasies of life in old Babylon with a swinging Nebuchadnezzar and a lovely handmaiden Nana-dirat. Mildly funny, hardly ever thrilling, it is quite endearing in its eccentric, self-indulgent fashion but something of a let-down from the author of Trout Fishing in America.

Perhaps it is fatigued memories of battering my way round the Hayward Gallery that lead me to a certain querulousness in this matter of the fashionably surreal. Everything, from a burlesque thriller to a historical novel is gradually being subsumed to our need for it, as if we were insatiable for any form of magic that can transmute the otherwise ineluctable dinge of Now.

Take Richard Brautigan first—he's likely to be first off the shelves, anyway. This book, he's on a trip back to the Forties, with a lousy private-eye ruined by an obsessive day-dream of Babylon. Now as Philip Marlowe and Lemmie Caution enriched my early childhood with fairy-tales, I looked coldly upon the genial, cuddly-coated cartoon figure on the front cover, and opened Brautigan with a certain severity.

Dreaming of Babylon, however, is undoubtedly funny; as long, that is, as the private-eye is trying to bum some bullets for his gun, or picking-up slowly on the clues of a plot that centres on a little body-snatching for a classy lady client. I must also report I enjoyed to the full those poignant moments of imagined phone-calls between the failed private-eye and his unforgiving mother—a far cry, these, from memories of ol' Ma Caution's pithy advice. The only trouble is that the passionate day-dream which has so impeded his whole career, namely Babylon itself, doesn't work. There the fantasy fails. We understand the problem, if only because Walter Mitty suffered it before. But Babylon doesn't hold us.

Brautigan's linguistic antics and gallows humor are extremely apt in his "perverse mysteries." Babylon upends the conventional private eye novel. It also wreaks havoc with the line between fantasy and reality. The hapless hero, C. Card, has hit the skids as a private investigator; he spends half his time trying to rustle up some bullets for his gun and the other half resisting the inducements of an imaginary, perfect world. A masterful comedy mixed with pathos.

A Lacanian reading of the postmodern elements of Dreaming of Babylon seems to confirm through the allegory of a painfully fragmented self that the postmodern self, although often schizophrenic in the way that Fredric Jameson describes, is also potentially highly creative.

These four narrators are in deep trouble. Victims or witnesses of the most macabre and horrifying possibilities that modern life—particularly American life—allows, they are hanging on like grim death to a sense of themselves. But selfhood is violently at risk in these doom-laden thrillers; there is no room for heroes or heroines, and probably not even for human beings, any more.

[Discusses Vidal's Kalki and Harris's Yukiko.]

Harris's authenticity and Vidal's grown-up inventiveness make Brautigan look childish. His rules are too restrictive; his convention of negating or parodying all conventions has become tiresomely rigid. This winsome pastiche of Chandler only makes one yearn for Chandler's own solidity of plot and complexity of characters, attributes which a freewheeling minimalist fiction cannot afford. Instead, bijou chapterettes, not long enough to look serious, tell the story strip-cartoon style. Set in San Francisco, 1942, it follows the misfortunes of a hopeless but cute private-eye with no bullets to his gun, unable to concentrate because he's always dreaming of being a champion baseball player in 596 BC, who's employed by a daunting blonde to steal a corpse from a one-legged morgue attendant but is prevented by the ruthless Sergeant Rink, who quells his opponents by shutting them in the morgue ice-box with the stiffs. And so on.

It is January 2, 1942, and C. Card [the protagonist of Dreaming of Babylon], the sorriest private eye in San Francisco, is down to his last chance. Dead broke, two months behind on his rent, unable even to buy bullets for his gun, he has one thing to look forward to: a meeting at six o'clock this evening with a mysterious client. All he has to do is keep the hunger pangs down, find some bullets, and stop dreaming of Babylon. Babylon is the fantasy world that C. Card escapes to whenever he can, and dreaming of Babylon is a sure way of missing his stop on the bus, losing touch with reality, and messing up in general. The suspense of waiting for that six o'clock meeting—and then of the tricky assignment that C. Card is given—is as mechanically constructed as a toy train, but that wouldn't be so bad if the payoff weren't so flat. Richard Brautigan has mastered all the forms of children's fiction—the short, easy-to-read sentences and paragraphs and chapters, the light touches of fantasy and humor—and children's fiction for adults is what this pretty skimpy book is all about.

Having recently seen the place for the first time, I thought for a moment or two that Richard Brautigan's Dreaming of Babylon might give me a new and bizarre insight into the fabled city; but—as I should have expected from earlier Brautigans—no such luck. Here we have the whimsical old drawler at it again, spilling out a trail of goofy inconsequences about a man who plays at being a private detective. For those who delight in this author's strenuously ingratiating facetiousness, another welcome offering; for the rest of us, another piece of inexplicable cultism.

The Dick-and-Jane prose style is undistinguished, and the deadpan narration by the first person hero is humorless. I don't doubt that Brautigan had a good time writing this book, but I had a bad time reading it.

The latest established writer to try his hand at the private eye novel is Richard Brautigan. His admirers would argue that Dreaming of Babylon isn't a private eye novel at all, despite an explicit statement on the dust jacket to this effect, and as one would expect from the author of Trout Fishing in America, private eye C. Card doesn't prove to be competent, or even real. But he is amusing, and the writing has its unattractive yet effective moments. "God had done him a favor when He stalled his car one rainy night on some railroad tracks just outside of Merced. He had been a traveling salesman: brushes. After the train hit his car they couldn't tell the difference between him and his brushes. I think they buried him with some of his brushes in the coffin, believing they were part of him." Much of it is a parody of the hard boiled: "He looked as if he'd get a lot of pleasure out of going ten rounds with your grandmother and making sure she went the whole distance. Afterwards you could take her home in a gallon jar." Some is irredeemably vulgar: the coffee offered by the morgue attendant tastes "like he got it out of the asshole of one of his corpse friends." Some of it is just right: a cop, not fat, tells a rich lady that if she will tell all he will make it easy on her, and she froths forth with: "Listen, fat cop. First, these handcuffs are too tight. Second, I want a beer. Third, I'm rich and it's already easy for me." But I don't think that Brautigan is likely to come this way again.