Category: Mainstream Publisher: Word Wrangler
ISBN-10: 1586300768
Type: Fiction
Pages: 120
Copyright: Jan 1 2001
A witty, sexy novel in which the ghost of Richard Brautigan helps Lamont Bistro, a Gulf War vet, learn how to master life and write fiction.
Lamont Bistro, a Gulf War vet with no future, falls in love with Jaguar Montaigne, a nineteen year old Bourbon Street stripper. The two move to the swamps of Louisiana, where Jaguar takes up painting salamanders on velvet, while Lamont conducts swamp tours looking for the legendary Honey Island Swamp monster. Lamont needs help in his marriage to the much younger Jaguar, and he finds it in a most unlikely source: the ghost of Richard Brautigan, who helps Lamont move from swamp guide to junkyard owner to novelist and father.
Excerpt
And so I was sitting in the kitchen at eleven p.m. on a Wednesday night, and it was July and the window was open and the refrigerator was humming. I was drinking a bottle of beer, and the humming was the background radiation of the universe, the universal om, or so it seemed. It so happened that I was humming and buzzing as well, perhaps from the beer, perhaps from cosmic radiation, or perhaps because the ghost of Richard Brautigan sat in the chair on the other side of the Formica table and said "Hi."
In the sixties and seventies, Brautigan had been a novelist, a counterculture icon before he entered permanent retirement by offing himself. He was humming a song, and somehow I knew that the song was about trout and watermelon sugar and the Springhill mining disaster and sombreros falling out of the sky and other things he had written about. I had read Brautigan for many years and I had come to this conclusion: he was weird and wrote offbeat prose, but he knew something the rest of us didn't, something about the strange little cracks in reality which, if examined, can be found to be repositories of that most precious commodity--truth.
Just as life during the pandemic was color-coded with different hues representing different levels of danger, life in its aftermath has become shaded in similar ways. As a self-styled “Seeker of Beauty with Beauty,” (borrowing from a quote by W.E.B.
'Better Without You'is a compelling narrative that explores the complexities of an affair, hidden secrets, and abuse. It also highlights a daughter's heartfelt journey as she cares for her mother who is battling dementia.
