Cloud Farming in Wales

“I wanted to write a novel that was me saying stuff about things rather than having to invent believable characters and a plot with measured incidents and resolutions,” writes the author and narrator of this zany jeu d’esprit. Taking Richard Brautigan’s Trout Fishing in America as his model, Hughes (Orpheus on the Underground) strings together a succession of short, episodic chapters in which a simple observation—frequently about the prodigious amount of rain that falls in Wales—compels him to free-associate outrageous speculations, quips, and puns. Noting that it rains nearly every single day, he proposes reducing rainfall by pairing up single days as couples. Further rumination on the weather leads to the inarguable tautology, “Every year an area equal to the size of Wales is rained on in Wales.” An inventor’s creation of a genetically engineered millipede-toucan leads him to wonder “who foots the bill.” Hughes’s droll humor is the stuff of Monty Python skits, and readers will find this book both witty and laugh-out-loud funny in spots. (July)