Trout Fishing in America

"It’s a bit of an oddball choice. I should start by saying this novel was written in 1967. No. Yes. No. It is and it isn’t. The book is really surreal. At one point one character says to another, “Pardon me, I thought you were a river.” That should give you an idea. Clever usually bugs me, if it’s clever for clever’s sake, if it doesn’t get to something deeper. What distinguishes Brautigan is that, despite this goofy sensibility and his wit, I always feel this clear-eyed moral vision that I can trust. Also, I just connected with his deep appreciation for the landscape – it’s all about trout streams. It’s about urban squalor, too. It’s got a lot of stuff for a thin, wacky book of poetry-prose. I can’t even honestly tell you that. I don’t know. I just know it worked on me. A love of nature and a love of humanity, I guess, those are the elements I carry around with me. The National Parks are a great place to start – Glacier National Park, Yellowstone National Park, Olympic National Park. I would recommend doing it off-season, if you can. There’s a reason they were preserved as national parks – pretty much most of the really incredible wonders of the West have been turned into national parks. The Grand Canyon as well. Get off the interstate. Just try to follow the old Route 66, which is all broken up by interstates now. But the little towns off the beaten path, with the little curio shops and wonder caves and pet museums – the kitsch of American roadside attractions is pretty fantastic. I do that stuff with my kid all the time. I love the potato museum in Idaho. There’s really a kind of haunted feel about it, too. Get the weekly Five Books newsletter The one for kids, yes. I’m familiar with Radiator Springs. It looks like Monument Valley. Yes, Cascadia, as we call it – the Pacific Northwest in general. If you see Seattle you should see Portland, too. Certainly they have histories as long and as rich as LA and San Francisco. Denver, as well, in a weird way, as a land-locked mountain town on the plateau, is still very Western. They’re just so very different, like the difference between Seattle and Tucson, and yet there is something that ties them together. They’re in the West. They say nobody ever runs East. Pretty much. Yes, and the more rural you get, the more Northwest you get – Alaska being the pinnacle of it – the more eccentric and rugged and idiosyncratic you’ll find people."