WILLARD AND HIS BOWLING TROPHIES: A Perverse Mystery

by Richard Brautigan ‧ RELEASE DATE: Sept. 15, 1975

When Brautigan is good he is pure magic. But when he is bad he is just perverse. Don't be fooled by the fact that the first chapter is about how Constance and Bob got into middlebrow S & M bondage because he got venereal warts because her novel didn't sell. That's not the perverted part of the mystery. And don't be so trusting as to think you will ever learn who stole the bowling trophies that surround their upstairs neighbors' pet papier mache bird Willard--that is, WHO stole the bowling trophies from the Logan boys who have sworn vengeance against the unknown thief. And WHO placed the informant phone call or WHY it was a ""$3000"" phone call or WHAT the Logan sisters' strange hobby is or what HAPPENS after the Logans break into the wrong apartment and kill Constance and Bob because the upstairs neighbors reversed the apartment numbers on a whim. Or even why WILLARD is smiling. Read this book and you'll be taken for a ride--a very short (112-page) ride. Contrariness and false leads are the operative principles of both plot and style. It's a blowzy, bad joke about a lot of San Franciscans whose lives are bad jokes with the usual diverting succession of Brautigan jabs into sad, spun-sugar comic realism--silly, stylized outrageous stuff about the Johnny Carson show and incomplete fragments by dead poets and love among the incompetents. Not the best Brautigan, just a facsimile thereof.

Pub Date: Sept. 15, 1975

ISBN: N/A

Page Count: -

Publisher: Simon & Schuster

Review Posted Online: N/A

Kirkus Reviews Issue: Sept. 1, 1975

Categories: FICTION