Willard and His Bowling Trophies by Richard Brautigan

Abstract

Reviews Willard and His Bowling Trophies. By Richard Brautigan. (New York: Simon & Schuster, Inc., 1975. 165 pages, $5.95.) Despite his pop proclivities and fashionable funkiness, a case can be made for Richard Brautigan as a serious writer of Western fiction. His first published and most traditional novel, A Confederate General from Big Sur (1964), is an innovative melding of Jack Kerouac and John Steinbeck. In Watermelon Sugar (1966), while fundamentally a beast fable, develops its bizarre gothic hi-jinks in a Western wilderness setting, including such conventions as a noon-time shoot-out, frontier community, an ecological validation, and promise for the good in a brave new world. The Abortion: An Historical Romance (1969) has some touching romantic escapades in a California environment. And Brautigan’s collection of short fiction, Revenge of the Lawn and Other Stories (1972), contains a good many insightful and often humorously told psychedelic stories with settings in Oregon and Washington. Trout Fishing in America (1967) is Brautigan’s most fascinating and complex work to date, the subject of some critical attention as well as wide­ spread popular appeal. This novel is a new Western, one redesigned for people who have lost the West but want it back again — only this time with more sophisticated primitivism, more love, hope, and self destiny instead of manifest destiny. Trout Fishing chapters are mosaics, a random collection of metaphorical memories fished up from the author’s consciousness, but working toward a perception — a contemplative and ultimate rejection of the meaninglessness of contemporary civilization. Here is the artist as artificer, the virtuoso at his clavier. Trout Fishing presents a Thoreau at Walden world that is an espousal of the truth in life’s small things, a cele­ bration of being “different” and “unique,” and joy in the pleasures of sensory awareness, tactile experience, and a gentleness which has been lost in the urbanized, gamesmanship world. Here Brautigan points to survival and fulfillment by bringing an external wilderness into an internal consciousness. 62 Western American Literature Those who are ‘‘trout fishing,” then, are those who have got it all together, the true believers tuned in to exploring with relaxed, natural openness what’s within you and without you. Brautigan’s last two novels have abandoned this unique vision in favor of exploiting the commercial and artistic possibilities of formula fiction. The Hawkline Monster (1974) by all rights should have been his master­ piece. For once Brautigan took some time where he could have thought out what he was writing, and combining a romance with the gothic in a Western setting promised a fine synthesis of his best previous motifs and themes. The first fifty or so pages is the finest writing Brautigan has ever done. But then he seems to give up with a shrug of “Jesus Christ, this articulated form and complex consciousness stuff is murderously hard work: I’m sure everyone will pay handsomely if I turn this one into a kitchy tale of four homy frontier folk who kill a sci fi monster in a no thermostat Halloween house, and then happily ride off together into a stoned sunset.” Willard and His Bowling Trophies (1975) also plays out a mock formula tale, this time the mystery, and this time without any brilliant opening pages. If setting makes Willard a Western novel, then so be it. The action takes place mostly in a San Francisco Fillmore District apartment house, and at various gas stations and motels from Alaska to Albuquerque where the Logan boys steal, murder, drink, and sleep on their perverse odyssey to recover their trophies. The characters are a sampling of representative counter-culture stereotypes, too nice to be entertainingly kinky, too unmoti­ vated to be pathetic, and too silly to sound any moral dimension. Maybe the book is really about the nature of art, itself — the way Wallace Stevens wrote poems about writing poetry. Willard is a mystery with, paradoxically, only unanswerable mysteries. We know where the stolen trophies are, but not why they are there. Nor do we know why they were stolen. The correct clues are uncovered, but the crime is never solved; grotesque events, such as Bob misplacing his mind or the...