First published in 1975, Willard and His Bowling Trophies was Richard Brautigan's sixth published novel and the second to parody a literary genre: sado-masochism in this case. The novel, as all others by Brautigan, dealt with the isolation of people from each other.

In real life, Willard was a papier máché sculpture, a bird about four feet high painted red, white, and orange with big, round eyes, a pot belly, and long beak created by Brautigan's friend Stanley Fullerton. Brautigan and Price Dunn enjoyed elaborate practical jokes on each other as part of passing Willard back and forth between themselves.
New York: Simon and Schuster, 1975
5.25" x 8.25"; 167 pages; ISBN 0-671-22065-9
Hard Cover, with dust jacket
Brown cloth boards; Tan gilt titles on spine; Tan endpapers
Front dust jacket color illustration by Wendell Minor
Book designed by Elizabeth Woll

Back dust jacket photograph by Jill Krementz of Brautigan

112 pages
Printed yellow wrappers

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In addition to the specific reviews detailed below, commentary about this book may also be included in General Reviews of Brautigan's work and his place in American literature, or reviews of his Collections.

The full text of this review reads

Richard Brautigan has a new book called Willard and His Bowling Trophies (Simon and Schuster). If you've read any Brautigan, you'll understand that there isn't any easy way to describe his books. If you haven't read any Brautigan, this is as good a place as any to start. He calls this novel "A Perverse Mystery," although there aren't any detectives or policemen to be seen. Just three sets of lives: one happy, one unhappy and one angry. These lives collide for reasons that only can be called perverse. Brautigan is again writing in a style that gives off heavy imitations of [Ernest] Hemingway—had Papa ever gotten around to blowing a lot of grass. The story is slim, but the nuances are all touching. Brautigan has real feeling for small lives that are just going on and going wrong. You'll find yourself liking his characters—and very often he makes you smile, which has to be worth something these days.

An unpredictable, marvelously funny satire peopled by oddball characters only Brautigan could imagine: the Logan brothers pursuing a crime-financed, three-year search for their stolen bowling trophies, a couple practicing sexual fantasies parodying those in The Story of O, and anoother couple who own Willard, a papier mache three foot bird, and incidentally have acquired the lost trophies. The brief paragraphs telling this madcap tale resemble a constantly interrupted but nevertheless comprehensible conversation with the evidently irrepresible Brautigan.

"America was a very large place and the bowling trophies were very small in comparison." With that indisputable (and all too representative) line, Richard Brautigan establishes the quandary of the three Logan brothers—oafish types from whom some cherished bowling trophies have been stolen. While the brothers are scouring America up and down, the trophies have fallen into the hands of a young San Francisco couple, John and Pat, who are keeping them in a room with a papier-mâché bird named Willard. In an apartment upstairs from John and Pat is another young couple, Bob and Constance, who, afflicted by misery and venereal warts, are caught in an inane sadomasochistic charade; at first, Bob enjoyed tying Constance up and flogging her lightly, but now, a year later, they keep repeating the game even though the fun is gone. There are a few small anchors for all this whimsy (the way John tries to avoid seeing the very end of the "Tonight Show", for example), and they may be all that prevents the book from rising out of the reader's hands and floating, deadpan, out the window.

There is double perversity in this bizarre thriller. Both the eccentric characters and Brautigan himself sometimes shock, sometimes gently amuse.

Brautigan hasn't developed much as a writer, but he has an irresistible knack of catching his reader unaware and for the present at least, that's more than good enough.

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Contemporary Literary Criticism. Vol. 9. Ed. Dedria Bryfonski. Detroit: Gale Research Company, 1978. 123-25.

The "mystery" concerns Willard (a papier-mâché bird capable of changing expressions) and his collection of trophies, stolen three years earlier from the Logan brothers (they are former bowling champions turned criminals and hot in pursuit of the trophies). Constance, a critically (but not economically) successful novelist, and her lover Bob (an amateur sadist ever since developing a case of venereal warts) account for the "perverse." Brautigan's whimsical style, his wildly imaginative similes, have served him well through five other novels. But here style and substance create an uneasy mix, the "real" world (represented by a quote from Senator Frank Church, "This land is cursed with violence"), strangely intruding into what seems a gentle fantasy. Brautigan fallen on and coming to grips with evil times—"a delight to read in a very sad way."

The Library Journal Book Review 1975. Ed. Janet Fletcher. New York: R.R. Bowker Company, 1977. 611.

Mr. Brautigan's images are inimitable. Willard is a papier-mâché bird, shadowy "like an unspoken prayer", who stands by about 50 stolen bowling trophies in a San Francisco flat. These prizes once proved the worthiness of three hero-worshipped brothers who, after a nation-wide search to recover their losses, take revenge against the wrong people. All are transformed in big-hearted short sentences. Humour is bang on.

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I can be just as opinionated as the next man, and this is a good time to be opinionated about last year's books, to pick favorites, to mention some I didn't have room to cover, and to flaunt a few prejudices.

Worst Novel: Willard and His Bowling Trophies: A Perverse Mystery by Richard Brautigan

Up to the author's usual standards: fey and wispy.

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Contemporary Literary Criticism. Vol. 12. Ed. Dedria Bryfonski. Detroit: Gale Research Company, 1980. 57-74.
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Contemporary Literary Criticism. Vol. 12. Ed. Dedria Bryfonski. Detroit: Gale Research Company, 1980. 57-74.
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A nude viewing of Johnny Carson is enlivened by the theft of some bowling trophies and the presence of a large papier-mâché bird.

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READ the full text of the reference to Brautigan. Kušnír teaches at The University of Presov, Slovakia. His abstract for this paper reads

Richard Brautigan's and Donald Barthelme's many works represent this kind of postmodern writing which, on the one hand, reflects the crisis of linguistic representation of the outer reality, and, on the other one, can be understood as the critique of the manipulative power of media shaping people's vision of the world. In my paper I will focus on the narrative and compositional strategies both authors use in their novels The King (Donald Barthelme) and Willard and His Bowling Trophies to pinpoint the role of popular culture and mass media in distorting the people's vision and understanding of outer reality.

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Though [Willard and His Bowling Trophies] may or may not be set in the '60s, it has an ad hoc discontinuousness [sic] appropriate to our recollection of that decade.

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Contemporary Literary Criticism. Vol. 12. Ed. Dedria Bryfonski. Detroit: Gale Research Company, 1980. 57-74.

In a letter to the editor ("Off the Hook." New York Times 5 October 1975, Sec. 7: 50) Hope Hale Davis comments on Rogers' review.


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[A] grim and wistful tale about what happens to a perfectly normal marriage attacked by a plague of veneral warts. . . . Richard Brautigan is still pretty funny, but he seems more and more to be engaged in solitary contemplation of his own quintessence.

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