Richard Brautigan: The Abortion (1973)

Richard Brautigan has this kind of casual, digressive way of writing that makes you want to follow him. The cover is black and a sort of silver with a multi-colored title and author name but no coffee stain. Oh, and it mentions that he's the author of Trout Fishing in America.

I'd better stick to short paragraphs in keeping with Brautigan's style, but that last book is alluded to by the narrator. See, the narrator is the librarian at the unpublished books library in San Francisco, where people go when they've written books that won't be published. And the librarian says a Richard Brautigan has deposited three or four books there, the first one being something to do with America.

He works from nine in the morning to nine at night, although some people come at any time and the librarian (who isn't given a name ) is only too willing to receive unwanted books which are cherished even if not read.

One such donor is the elderly Mrs Charles Fine Adams, who gifts her 'Growing Flowers by Candle Light in Hotel Rooms' at three in the morning. As she's walked such a long way to get to the library, the librarian gives her a coffee and some cookies. That's the kind of guy he is: he lives at the library and has been there for three years, oblivious to the goings on in the outside world.

He's probably not had sex for three years either, until Vida happens to walk into his life with a book on the horrors of beauty, and she should know because she's unbelivably beautiful, although the librarian – can we now call him Honey as that's what Vida comes to call him? – feels uncomfortable about getting naked with someone he doesn't know.

And she stays, at least until she has to have an abortion, which means taking a trip to Tijuana because it was illegal in the States. So Honey slightly reluctantly leaves his only work associate to mind his precious library. Honey, as the narrator, is as self-deprecating as ever as he tries to describe what Vida is wearing:

'Vida put on a simple but quite attractive white blouse with a short blue skirt – you could see easily above her knees – and a little half-sweater thing on over the blouse. I've never been able to describe clothes so that anyone knows what I'm talking about.'

Two main events, or rather chains of events happen on the way to Tijuana and back: Vida arrests the attention of every male (including young boys) she comes across, even to the point of causing minor accidents. And Honey has great problems adjusting to a world he's forsaken for what Vida describes as a 'monastery'.

Also on the way, Vida starts thinking of what Honey can do for a proper job. But that's really another story, or another life.

Famously (if we can use such a word for a writer people were beginning to forget), Brautigan blew his brains out in 1984 at the age of 49. But his wish to have a library for unpublished books has florished as the Brautigan Library, and unlike the library in the novel, anyone can read the newer .pdfs online.