Sombrero Fallout

American author and poet Richard Brautigan’s surrealist novel Sombrero Fallout: A Japanese Novel (1976) concerns a humorist's attempt to cope with heartbreak and writer's block by writing a story about a sombrero falling from the sky. In its review, The St. Louis Post-Dispatch writes, "The style of short chapters and glowing humor is typical of a Brautigan novel; its touchingly funny moments and its interesting experimentation make it one of his best."

The book's protagonist, a well-known American humorist living in San Francisco, is currently heartbroken over the loss of his Japanese girlfriend of two years. Tormented by the loss of his girlfriend and stricken with a case of writer's block, the humorist sits down at his typewriter to write a story involving a frigidly cold sombrero hat that falls from the sky, landing in the middle of Main Street in a town in the American Southwest. Immediately bored with the story and dejected over his apparent inability to come up with anything better, the humorist tears the page from his typewriter and crumples it into the wastebasket.

The humorist then proceeds to tear his apartment to shreds in the hope of finding a single loose hair from his departed lover. The narrative shifts to describe how the humorist and his girlfriend met. At the time, she is working in a psychiatric hospital in San Francisco. After work one day, she meets the humorist, a man who rivals many of her patients in terms of mental health conditions. He rambles for hours, debating such topics as whether to eat a tuna fish sandwich, even though he has no tuna fish in his home. When she finally breaks off the relationship with him, she vows never to date a writer again. Her next boyfriend, she promises herself, will be a broom.



Back in the present, it is 10:15 p.m. and the humorist cannot decide if he is hungry or not. He considers leaving the apartment to buy a hamburger before deciding against it; after all, he already ate two hamburgers yesterday. He frantically rummages through the refrigerator and kitchen cabinets looking for eggs, even though he knows there aren't any. He also returns to his old tuna fish obsession, proclaiming his hatred of mayonnaise and his worry over the mercury levels in tuna fish.

Meanwhile, the story of the falling sombrero takes on a life of its own from the wastebasket. Through some kind of psychic origami, the crumpled page straightens itself and sets out to find the Southwestern town the humorist originally imagined. The story reaches the town where the icy cold hat falls from the sky, as ordained by the humorist. What results is the town devolving into an angry mob that spreads past the boundaries of the small municipality, killing thousands in the process. Federal troops are called in, and the crisis intensifies. The violence only comes to a halt after a heroic appearance by the real-life novelist Norman Mailer.

In its closing lines, the book asks, "But what about the sombrero? It's still there, lying in the street. How can you miss a very cold white sombrero lying in the Main Street of a town? In other words: There's more to life than meets the eye."



Though there may be little at first glance to connect the story of a heartbroken humorist and a cold hat that causes a riot, the author might be creating a juxtaposition between reality and fiction. In the humorist's storyline, reality is depicted as a kind of crippling stasis, in which even a choice as simple as what to eat becomes an impossible task. With nothing happening outside of the humorist's fevered brain, he is left with only his torment over his lost love. By contrast, the story of the frozen sombrero causes a bewildering flurry of action. However, while the events surrounding the sombrero might be more interesting and liberating in the sombrero’s lack of stasis, the narrative also results in the deaths of thousands of people, leaving the reader with a feeling of ambiguity about the novel.

Bewildering and frequently nonsensical, Sombrero Fallout is, nevertheless, a solid example of why Brautigan is one of the most influential writers of the 20th century.