Willard and His Bowling Trophies Review

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(More customer reviews)This novel is about fate and tragedy and people whose lives are connected by circumstance. It has all the Brautigan touches: poetry as prose, simple writing, great turns of phrase, and a story that is at once outlandish, hilarious, tragic and wholly original.
The story involves two couples and three brothers. One couple has a very healthy, happy relationship. In their apartment is Willard, a bird sculpture, and some bowling trophies they purchased at a sale years ago. These are second-hand bowling trophies. The other couple's relationship isn't as happy. The husband is depressed, and the wife, in an attempt to make him happy, participates in his S&M fantasies though she doesn't enjoy them. The brothers, as the story goes, were once good, upstanding citizens from a good upstanding family. That is, until several years ago when their bowling trophies were stolen, destroying their faith in humanity. They made a pact to recover the bowling trophies, whatever the cost, and began down a road of violence and murder.
You either love or hate Brautigan's work. I'm in the former camp. I don't know any writer so unique. Part of the beauty in his work is in the depth behind the simplicity. But like a simple painting, one person might look and say, "My seven-year-old could have done that," while another, like myself, finds that pretty much all of Brautigan's work speaks to them in some way.
Along with SO THE WIND WON'T BLOW IT ALL AWAY and AN UNFORTUNATE WOMAN, WILARD is one of Brautigan's tragic novels. In fact, in one of my favorite parts of the novel, the husband reads from a book of bits and pieces of Greek tragedies because only bits and pieces have survived through the years. But he's fascinated by them because he can feel the tragedy of the whole in just a few words. In the same way, in Willard we are given a thin slice of the life of these characters, but we feel the tragedy of the whole.

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