One Dirty Buzz

I've never liked Bradbury, but I figured I'd give *Dandelion Wine* a chance because it wasn't a genre piece. Neither sci fi, nor fantasy. Two types of storytelling I dislike immensely. My logic, as usual, is simple: Why fuck around with Martians when you can read about real life?

The whole damn book reads like it was written to sell to a mass market. The copyrights go back to 1947 and this is way bad news of the house-on-fire variety. Bits of it were published in Charm, McCall's and Everywoman's Family Circle. Time, according to the back cover, had this to say: "Dandelion Wine is fine and new and rare. . . A giddy leap into nostalgia."

In the summer of 1974, Bradbury wrote an introduction for the book, from which I now quote.

"The wine still stands in the cellars below. My beloved family still sits on the porch in the dark. The fire balloon still drifts and burns in the night sky of an as yet unburied summer. Why and how? Because I say it is so."

We are able to forever keep the joys of the past present in our minds, through memory. Bradbury never doubts memory's infallibility. The idea that memory can keep us rooted to our pasts comes up quite a bit, in the novel. The wine referred to in the title serves as a metaphor, throughout the stories, for this very idea.

The plot is (barely) held together by the protagonist discovering he's alive and that he must also, one day, die. That's an outstanding premise, but it is all so poorly executed that I'm still aching from some passages. Not that any one, in and of itself, is ever that bad; but the way they stack up on each other, revealing a crude nostalgia for a cast of family members and townsfolk that interact with one another with all the depth and feeling of sock puppets gets grating, after awhile.

The sentimentality of this novel, and it gets pretty damn thick, is almost as bad as the wooden, Jerry-Mathers-chatting-it-up-with-Hugh-Beaumont dialogue. The ridiculous situations (two brothers rescue a fortune telling mannequin), flat characters (the preachy grandfather was particularly unbelievable, only because Bradbury depicts other characters actually listening to the old fart), out-of-place props (The Happiness Machine), and general lack of focus make this a testament to bad American storytelling.

I put the book down with the impression that Bradbury's memories were turned sour by bad child actors (from both radio and television) and the desire to market short stories and radio dramas.