In Watermelon Sugar by Richard Brautigan

Photo PSA: I use the Nashville Public Library like a credit card with no limit. I get more mileage out of the Libby app than should probably be allowed. So when you see a header image that isn't a book cover or isn't a picture of the book in my hand, it's because I got the audiobook or ebook from the library.

This is a hard book to explain cleanly, but the basics are this -
In a place called iDEATH, everything is made of watermelon sugar. Homes, clothes, fuel. In the beginning, you get the sense that life here is simple, easy. But as you read on, you learn that these simple, sweet lives are tainted by memories of talking tigers who occasionally eat the citizens of the town, albeit politely, and some members of the community are not handling this past trauma very well.

In Watermelon Sugar feels like pure surrealism. Distant, off, and unsettling, but interesting.

As I read it, I felt something akin to excitement, but it was not excitement. It was more curiosity. The story was so novel that I just needed to see where the author was going with it all.

I tried to describe this book to my partner and landed on Tom Robbins - Even Cowgirls Get the Blues and Still Life with Woodpecker - turned up to 11 and darker.

The tigers are a good example of what I mean by darker. They eat people. In front of other people. While chatting with the onlookers. And they apologize for their nature requiring them to eat people.

They are aware enough to know that it is their nature to kill and eat humans, aware enough to not eat children even, but not aware enough to seek an alternative?

You need to read this book to really get the idea here, but these tigers are polite and articulate. At one point, they help a human child with math homework. Their awareness and politeness make the violence sharper and heavier than if they were wild animals without language to express themselves.

It is like when we witness a politician, celebrity, or spiritual leader doing something to harm the community, but they deliver their reasoning in such a way that some people are willing to accept it as "their personality" or "their nature," while others feel the weight of their influence in the most negative ways.

And then there is the world itself. iDEATH did not feel like a utopia to me, but I think it was meant to present itself as one at first. I think because I grew up in a time when The Truman Show and The Stepford Wives trope was popular, I am programmed to not trust anything that is even remotely too good to be true.

From the beginning, it felt like something had gone wrong there. While it is not said in the story, I get the sense that this is a post tragedy, perhaps even post apocalyptic time. Instead of rubble and wastelands, we find a society that rebuilt everything out of sweetness, literally.

Everything is softened. Simplified. Made easier to live with by covering it in sugar.

As the story goes on, the environment screams avoidance. Like the whole place is built on the idea that if you make everything gentle enough, you do not have to deal with what actually happened. Just paint over it. Turn it into something digestible.

What is neat about this is that the author did this with the language as well. The writing is soft, repetitive, almost poetic. Especially in the beginning, it has a lullaby quality to it.

When the narrator talks about his family being eaten by the tigers, and then mentions that the tigers helped him with his math homework while this was going on, it lands harder because of how calmly the story is told. The tone and the content do not match, which makes the discomfort almost unbearable.

While the narrator comes off flat and almost emotionless, the other characters have a full presence. They feel developed, but a bit unreal. Pauline, for example, feels like she is being filtered through the narrator's feelings about her. She is soft and slightly out of reach.

I did not connect with any of the characters in the story, but that is normal for me. I read more as a passenger than anything else. I am not looking to see myself in the characters. I am watching what the world is doing, and this book is perfect for people who read like that. If you are a character driven story person and want to empathize with the characters, you may not enjoy this as much.

Nothing gets resolved. The ending is abrupt. It just stops. No real resolution, no attempt to tie anything together. I would not call it unsatisfying. It is consistent with the rest of the book. Very novel.

Now that I have finished it, I can tell it is going to stick with me, just not in the same way that other books I have read recently are staying with me. Books like Severance or Everything You Ever Wanted linger harder in my mind, almost like a trauma, because they are set in contemporary times. I see a lot of my life in those books, which is alarming. If you have read either of those books, you know.

But the imagery of this book is so unique and captivating that I think the oddness of it is going to stay with me for a long time.

If I had to describe it, I would call it surrealist dystopian literary fiction with a strong lean toward poetry. But even that feels too tidy. The book itself is more of a mood. A very specific, very controlled kind of strangeness. Something gentle on the surface, but with just enough underneath to make you uneasy.

And it does not fully go away when you close the book.