Barnes,1976

"No Picnic"
Julian Barnes
New Statesman, 21 May 1976, p. 685.
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Recent Brautigan comes equipped with helpfully generic subtitles: after '. . . An Historical Romance 1966', after '. . . A Gothic Western', we come to '. . . A Perverse Mystery.' The perversity is supplied by Bob and Constance, half-hearted bondage kinks whose idea of foreplay is a good browse in The Greek Anthology; they are rather sad and cry a lot. The mystery consists in the whereabouts of a terrific set of bowling trophies stolen from some famous bowlers called the Logan Brothers; they are rather tough. Downstairs from Bob and Constance live John and Pat, who actually have the trophies, and keep them arranged round Willard, a papier-mâché bird. John and Pat are very fond of Willard, always wish him goodnight, and even consider taking him to a Greta Garbo movie; they are rather soppy.

Gosh, that's torn it: I was only explaining the title, and find I've given away the entire plot. But that always seems to be the way with Mr Brautigan's winsome and gruelly fictionettes. I was rather cross, actually, about the Perverse Mystery bit, because thinking up a subtitle is at least one way of using the vacant brain-space which reading Brautigan leaves one. Still, being a conscientious critic, I puzzled genially at the perverse mystery of his staggering popularity. How can it be that whole campuses crease themselves at a humour which seems no more than whacky cuteness? How is it, when others wonder at the 'precise coolness of language' The Times of this 'born writer' Sunday Times, that one feels appalled at the glaring and embarrassing bits of 'writing'?

"A mind so sharp it could have picnicked on a razor blade . . . He hungered like a lost star for the cool evening of her inner touch . . . Sex had been to them like having a beautiful picnic in a field of comets . . . She sat down very carefully on the floor beside him as if she were sitting on a decayed spider web."

Picnic Imagery in Brautigan—now there's a thesis (don't miss the Muffet-references in the last quote). Finally, I wondered, how can anyone bear the pacelessness of it all? You plod through chapterino 8 (a whole page), which tells you how the Logan Brothers are waiting in a dingy hotel for a phone call to tell them where their bowling trophies are, and you are rewarded with this opening to chapterino 9:

"Meanwhile—ess than a mile away from the tiny dingy hotel room where the Logan brothers waited for a telephone call which would provide them with the locations of the bowling trophies—Willard . . ."

It's like following a strip cartoon every day—one step back for every two forward; terrific, of course, for those with spaced-out memories.

Cüpper,2003

"Less Is More or Less: Richard Brautigan: Willard and His Bowling Trophies—A Perverse Mystery, Sombrero Fallout—A Japanese Novel"
Mélanie Cüpper
Bulletin de l'Association des Germanistes diplômés de l'Université de Liège, vol. 15, Mar. 2003: ***?***.
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The visuality, fragmentary arrangements, narratorial hopelessness, and cacophonic simplicity of Richard Brautigan's Willard and his Bowling Trophies and Sombrero Fallout, render both texts comparable not only in their structures and stylistic fast-foodism, but also in the themes which they address. While recognizing the influence and effect of consumer goods, food and American mass culture, the growth of technology and changes in the perception of reality, both novels identify the psychological difficulties in establishing (authorial) individuality in a fragmented world. Focusing on minimalist concerns for the near-at-hand, the domestic, the unexceptional, and the unpretentious, Brautigan, the writer of discontinuity and juxtaposition, aims at the enunciation of problematical and temporary truths while saying a minimum rather than a maximum: in his fiction, there is a constant vacillation between the maximalism of being and the minimalism of everyday life.

Willard and Sombrero are (meta)narratives, ordinary and transcendent at once. Willard is a novel full of sketches, a well-balanced mixture of erotic narrative and detective novel, where Anacreon is quoted while the door is kicked in; this Perverse Mystery is a collage of the hazardous interaction of the lives of two neighbouring couples and that of the picaresque Logan brothers. Sombrero is a literary triptych made up of the humorist's life, a Japanese dream and the story of a town; this Japanese Novel is the narration of a humorist's internal and a town's external conflict and the general progressive loss of proportion.

The subtitles A Perverse Mystery and A Japanese Novel express the author's wish to present his texts as if they were written in accordance with certain established conventions of genre; academically ignored, however, Brautigan's (pop)ular fiction remains mysterious, and to some extent genre-less; a vacuum of interpretation is left to be filled by a diversity of means, ranging from Marxist and Freudian thought to Adornoism and Hegelian dialectics up to visual art aesthetics and the author/text ("readerly") and text/reader ("writerly") relationships. Sombrero and Willard challenge not only the notion of the writer's or the reader's role, the idea of authorial control versus collaborative creation, but also the classification of the epistemological identity of the narration and its objects. Are they synoptic, analytic, or panoptic?

Like Brautigan's texts, my study employs a wide network of surface (main text) and depth (footnotes) to interconnect divergent ideas: Schopenhauer's Platonic disclosure is juxtaposed with Barthes' theories of myth and Debordian Situationism; there is a sombrero, some bowling trophies, a papier-mâché bird and lots of food, which is associated with the sex appeal of the (in)organic and examined from a number of recent theoretical perspectives including Lyotard's and Jameson's definition of postmodernism, while the whole leans towards semiotic fetishism, and Baudrillard's and Eco's descriptions of the hyperreal in American post-culturalism.

Davis,1975

"Willard and His Bowling Trophies: A Perverse Mystery by Richard Brautigan"
L. J. Davis
New Republic, 20 Sep. 1975, p. 30.
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It strikes me that the secret of Richard Brautigan's fiction and poetry is that, like the symbolism of D. H. Lawrence, it means exactly what it seems to mean. Trying to delve deeply into it is like trying to delve deeply into a cigar box: what's in it may be good, bad or indifferent, but there really isn't very much of it and its pleasures are soon exhausted. It may be a sign of the times (or something) and it is certainly a symptom of the current state of American fiction that some critics doggedly persist in treating Brautigan as if he were a Joseph Conrad instead of an Art Buchwald: it is such a blessed relief to find someone who writes so nicely. There is no denying that he turns a pretty phrase and does so often: it is his greatest gift, and not one to be stinted. But it should also not be overlooked that turning a pretty phrase is just about all that he does. There is a streak of sadness in him that is refreshingly without self-pity and a streak of kindness that is almost magically free of condescension, but the fact remains that he is a constructor of sentences, not a fabricator of situations. When he looks out on the world, he sees shapely prose and not the dark and vagrant mysteries of the human condition. The reader will find no sense of majesty here, or of its loss, no irritating complications such as madness and thwarted hope, no terror but a good deal of pity. Richard Brautigan will give no one bad dreams. He is sorry for us, and he is fun to read. When one has said that about him, one has said about all there is to say.

Willard and His Bowling Trophies finds the mixture much the same as before; things have not changed since his last novel, The Hawkline Monster, or the novel before that, The Abortion, or the novel before that, In Watermelon Sugar, or the novel before that, etc., going all the way back to his first, Trout Fishing in America. If anything, the books are getting easier to read all the time, as though the traditional pedagogical progression were to be reversed, with the first graders starting on early Fitzgerald ("A Diamond as Big as the Ritz" comes instantly to mind) and graduating seniors ending up with Dick and Jane Go To Camp. You could stretch Trout Fishing over a couple of pleasant days; Willard and His Bowling Trophies takes about an hour and a half. It is about Bob and Constance, a nice young San Francisco couple who are into a mild sadomasochistic scene while Bob slowly falls apart and spends most of his time reading The Greek Anthology. Brautigan feels sorry for them. The reader will feel sorry for them too. Downstairs live John and Pat. John and Pat are another nice couple. Richard Brautigan likes them. The reader will wish they lived right next door. John and Pat are the owners of Willard, a papier-mâché bird sculpted by an obscure artist living on his wits. Surrounding Willard are dozens of bowling trophies. John and Pat found them in an abandoned car in Marin County. Together with Willard they make quite a display. Depending on taste, the reader may wish he had one just like it. I do.

The bowling trophies have been stolen from the Logan brothers, sturdy, upright young amateur champions of the sport, who have been turned into thieves, desperadoes and finally murderers as they aimlessly scour America for their lost treasure. I think the bowling trophies and the Logans' search for them are meant to represent the sleaziness and degrading pointlessness of American life. I think Brautigan thinks so too. (What Willard means is anyone's guess; I think Brautigan wants it that way.) The novel tells the story of the end of the brothers' three-year quest. It is not a happy ending but, like everything Brautigan attempts, it is nicely done.

Richard Brautigan has a sort of modified Midas touch: instead of gold, everything turns into feathers. They are handsome feathers and they have been arranged with the skill of a Japanese floral designer; I am going to place the book in my extensive collection of Brautiganiana, with my thanks to the author for having provided me with a relaxing 90 minutes, my face sometimes touched with the ghost of a smile, sometimes with the ghost of a frown. And having placed it there, I am going to take down my copy of Hemingway's "Big Two-Hearted River" and listen once again to Nick Adams as he things about how, soon, he will have to fish the swamp. A place Brautigan will never go.

Frank,1975

"Brautigan"
Sheldon Frank
The National Observer, 11 Oct. 1975, p. 21.
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Richard Brautigan fans and Richard Brautigan foes, bear with me. Now, I know the literate world is divided between those who think Brautigan is the cat's pajamas and those who think he's a monkey's uncle, but I insist that one may discriminate even here. Let me offer a brief, biased review of his oeuvre:

His first two novels, Trout Fishing in America and A Confederate General from Big Sur, were okay. Disarming, sly, and obliquely autobiographical, they contained just the right combination of goofiness and clarity that is his particular talent. But his third, In Watermelon Sugar, was a disaster. Coy, cutesy, heavy-handed, sentimental, it displayed all of his weaknesses and few of his charms. When The Abortion: An Historical Romance 1966 seemed only a little better, I was convinced that Brautigan was finished.

Well, I was wrong. His next novel, The Hawkline Monster, was a gem. The prose was clean, accurate, controlled. As advertised, the novel was "a Gothic Western," and Brautigan masterfully fused those disparate genres.

There was obviously more to Brautigan than had met my eye, and his newest novel only confirms my rediscovery of his talents. Another experiment in mixed genres, Willard and His Bowling Trophies is subtitled "A Perverse Mystery." Unlike The Hawkline Monster, it is not flawless, but it is a very sad and very funny book.

Willard is a three-foot-high papier-mache bird residing in an apartment in San Francisco, where he's surrounded by 50 bowling trophies that his owner, John, says he found in an abandoned car. While John and his girlfriend, Pat, live an ordinary San Francisco life—attending Garbo movies, eating turkey sandwiches, making love—the three Logan brothers, the real owners of the stolen trophies, ravage the country for their lost treasures.

But the heart of the novel occurs upstairs, in the apartment of Bob and Constance. Once they enjoyed a wonderful relationship, but a virus got the best of them. Bob acquired the venereal aliment that Constance picked up from a drunken one-night stand with a middle-aged lawyer, and the resultant danger of continual contagion has made normal sex impossible for them.

Instead, they find their poignant pleasure playing a mild, awkward version of The Story of O. But Bob is a broken man. Life is not very happy for Bob and Constance.

True to Brautigan's intention to write a "perverse mystery," the stories of the Logan brothers and of Bob and Constance collide in an ending that is, unfortunately, arbitrary and outlandish. Brautigan wants to comment on our random violence, but he overplays his hand; the brutal force of the Logan boys and the delicate realism of Bob and Constance mix like oil and water. This time Brautigan shouldn't have attempted fusing his genres; taken separately, the Logan brothers are horrifying, entertaining morons, and the story of Bob and Constance is the best writing Brautigan has ever done.

Gordon,1981

"Richard Brautigan's Parody of Arthur Miller"
Andrew Gordon
Notes On Modern American Literature, vol. 6, no. 1, Spring-Summer 1981, Item 8.
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Willard and His Bowling Trophies: A Perverse Mystery (1975) is another in Richard Brautigan's series of whimsical experiments taking off on popular genres of American fiction (he spoofs the Western in The Hawkline Monster: A Gothic Western (1974) and the detective novel in Dreaming of Babylon: A Private Eye Novel 1942 (1977)). This sardonic black comedy concerns, among other things, the search of the Logan brothers for their stolen bowling trophies, a quest which takes on the character of an obsession and ends in senseless slaughter. Behind Brautigan's whimsy is a serious sense of despair about the inevitable decay caused by the misguided American worship of money and success; thus he mixes farce and violence in a blend of comedy and tragedy. As the title suggests, it is a perverse "mystery" story in which the solution to the mystery (who stole the bowling trophies and why?) is deliberately withheld in order to make the reader ponder Brautigan's deeper moral concerns.

The story of the Logan brothers contains a deliberate spoof of elements of another work about the tragic effects of the American cult of success, Arthur Miller's play, Death of a Salesman. Brautigan's simple-minded, apple-pie American Logan family parodies Miller's Loman family. The Logan father is a mechanic with "a Midas touch when it came to transmissions": the double entendre suggests both the automotive repair company and the legend of King Midas, who was cursed by his golden touch. Unfortunately, Mr. Logan had a lot of trouble talking to people. Sometimes he wished that people were transmissions (Willard and His Bowling Trophies (WBT), 82). He is a stripped-down version of Miller's salesman, Willy Loman, defining himself completely by his job and unable really to communicate with people. Mother Logan is similarly a reductio ad absurdum of Linda Loman: "a pleasant woman who minded her own business and did a lot of baking" (WBT, 48).

Most significantly, however, the three Logan brothers actually live out the childish fantasies of Miller's perpetual adolescents, Biff and Happy Loman. As Happy tells his brother in the play, "We form two basketball teams, see? Two water-polo teams. We play each other. It's a million dollars' worth of publicity. Two brothers, see? The Loman brothers." In Willard, the Logan brothers "had formed a very good, actually a championship bowling team that they played on for years" (WBT, 26). The Logan brothers like the Lomans, are vacuous, all-American boys indoctrinated in a naive faith in financial success and salesmanship. At one point, one of the Logans reads an ad in a comic book offering a great opportunity for kids to sell salve door-to-door. "He wondered why he had never sold salve when he was a kid. It looked like a real interesting way to make money" (WBT, 90). Later, he decides he "would have preferred to be a child, selling salve to his neighbors and earning lots of money selling something that made people feel better when they used it and afterwards thought kindly of him for selling the salve to them" (WBT, 122). Thus Brautigan shows how the American gospel of winning friends and influencing people is yoked to the cult of salesmanship and economic success. For Brautigan, it is a comic-book idea presented ironically in deliberately simple, comic-book language.

The Logan brothers at first lead a placid existence bowling and worshipping their gold-plated bowling trophies. Nevertheless, as the story proceeds, these caricatures of all-American puerility reveal the potential for psychopathic violence beneath that bland exterior. Once their golden trophies are stolen, the brothers lose their "all-American innocence" (WBT, 31). In their obsessive search for the missing prizes, they deteriorate into a gang of vicious criminals: Their future was America and three long years of gradual character disintegration and a slow retreat from respectability and self-pride. In three years they would become what they had always despised" (WBT, 82).

Like Death of a Salesman, Willard and His Bowling Trophies concerns in part the human waste created by the American worship of financial success, but unlike Miller, Brautigan sees America as betrayed by comic-book ideas and irredeemably corrupt. Mr. Logan has his "Midas touch" and his sons have their golden trophies, but aside from that they are empty. Brautigan's satire is both an homage to Miller's play and a despairing commentary on Miller's message from the vantage point of an additional quarter century of American history. Brautigan's black comedy dehumanizes his characters and allows us no sympathy with them, and his violent finale deliberately omits the redemptive overtones of the "Requiem" in Miller's play. Willard is a bleak farce that sees America as a trap with no escape: "'It doesn't make much difference where we look,' his stern brother answered, surrounded by America in every direction" (WBT, 114).

Kušnír,2000

"Richard Brautigan's and Donald Barthelme's Crisis of Representation: The King and Willard and His Bowling Trophies: A Perverse Mystery"
Jaroslav Kušnír
Paper submitted for conference on PostModern Productions, University of Erlangen, Germany, 2000.
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As many critics and theorists argue, postmodern writing is marked by a crisis of representation. Postmodern literary work mostly does not refer to outer reality, but to the complex system of linguistic and other "discourses." One of the main characteristic features and aims of postmodern writing, though, is not to gloom, distort reality, but to show the inability of the human mind to perceive and understand the "objective" reality, the autoritarian and objective "truths." Many authors, including Donald Barthelme and Richard Brautigan, show that the advanced technology able to reach wide audiences seems to be this manipulative power able to shape and distort the public opinion, the vision of reality and objective "truths." The development of high technology has stimulated the development and spreading of the mass media and mass-circulated popular magazines manipulating the cultural tastes of broad audiences.

In their novels Richard Brautigan (Willard and His Bowling Trophies: A Perverse Mystery) and Donald Barthelme (The King) use the language of both media (radio, television, newspapers) and popular genres (medieval romance, pornography, thriller) to show, on the one hand, the inability of language to convey the "objective truths," the "objective" vision of the world, and, on the other one, the manipulative power of popular culture at shaping public opinion and the "low" cultural tastes of broad audiences.

It cannot be said, however, that either Barthelme's or Brautigan's novels, or generally postmodernist texts do not refer to social reality. "Representing" either "contemporary" reality, contemporary protagonists (Brautigan) or historical (medieval) characters (kings, knights, princesses) mingled with contemporary, even "real" ones (Walesa, Hitler, Ezra Pound—Barthelme) both authors not only undermine the genres with tradionally stable structure, but also show the distorting power of representation.

Brautigan in his novel Willard and His Bowling Trophies uses the language and textual strategies especially of pornography and thriller to emphasize the negative aspects of popular cultural forms in the context of American cultural tradition. It is especially the violence (physical, sexual) and its imagery which dominates this novel. Violence is understood as a natural aspect of protagonists' behaviour and lives. Imagery of violence occur in both relatively separate sections of the novel—in the section with the lovers' couples it is especially the sexual violence manifested in deviant sexual practises (sadomasochism of Constance and Bob) and in the Logan brothers section it is a real, physical violence, murder and death. Violence in Brautigan's novel seems to be directly stimulated by popular culture and media and turns to ritualistic practises, ritualistic behaviour which replaces human communication. His protagonists are rid of their individual, specific, natural identity and gain "public" identity manipulated by the media and popular culture "discourse." Constance's and Bob's sexual practises are inspired by their reading of Gothic sadomasochistic novel and watching TV and films: "Bob tied a knot in the center of the hankerchief as he had seen on television and in the movies . . ." (Brautigan 20).

The Logan brothers' vision of reality is distorted by their reading of comic books and watching TV:

"He was staring at the cow in the same way that he read comic books.
'It doesn't make much difference where we look,' his stern brother answered, surrounded by America in every direction." (114)

Their reading of popular cultural magazines seems to be a direct stimulation of their violence:

"He'd never killed anybody before. He turned the comic book a few pages to some characters in the comic book who were killing each other. They were using axes and it was very bloody. A hand was lying on the floor. The hand did not look happy." (122)

In Brautigan's novel, media, film and comic books represent popular culture as the manifestation of consumerist culture for broad audiences, one of the negative aspects of which is their power to influence not only the public opinion, but especially the public behavior. This consumerist aspect of culture is supported by Brautigan's juxtaposing of imagery of popular culture and eating habits. Perception and understanding of film, comic pornographic books thus becomes, for Brautigan's protagonists, on the one hand, an act of mere consumerism as represented by eating , on the other one their perception of reality and reality mediated by media and popular culture merges into a vision of the world they understand as the only one, the only "real world." The exaggeration and irony are the means which emphasize the stupyfying character of the act of consumerism associated not only with the eating habits, but also with consumerist culture in general. The image of both couples' kitchens, for example, is juxtaposed to achieve this effect:

"Patricia and John's kitchen was directly underneath Bob and Konstance's kitchen and they were at this moment all in their own kitchens.
Upstairs Bob was mourning people who had been dead for over two thousand years. Constance was trying to console him. Tears were slowly drying on his face.
Downstairs John was making a turkey sandwich. He was pulling off pieces of meat from an ornate-looking turkey carcass on the table.
Patricia was pouring out big glasses of ice cold milk to go with the sandwiches while they were watched the Johny Carson show in the bedroom, and as soon as she finished with her sandwich and glass of milk, she would be fast asleep . . . " (127)

In addition to it, Logan brothers' decision to become killers is stimulated by a banal, unmotivated and exaggerated decision stimulated by the lack of their favourite drink:

"'Sure,' he said. 'Let's kill them.'
If he'd a beer , cold and comfortable, in his hand he would not have wanted to kill them. He would have said instead, 'No, let's just beat the shit out of them and get our trophies and go home.'" (121-122)

Brautigan's protagonists are thus rid off their individual, natural and human identities and turn to be only the imitating models of their prototypical popular cultural models. They thus gain, paradoxically, a mass, or collective conciousness and idenity which seems to be ". . .signs of increasing corporate and beaurocratic and cybernetic control of collective experience and thought" (Russell 213).

In difference from Brautigan's rather explicit treatment of the influence of popular culture and mass media on the behavior of people, Barthelme depicts his protagonists as entrapped in the "collective discourse" of different linguistic utterances represented by radio, newspapers, medieval and contemporary, colloquial as well as professional speech, all fighting for their legitimatization. The medieval and contemporary, real historical and fictitious characters are depicted as self-reflexive and metafictional constructs unable of positive development meditating on their "roles" both in fiction and reality. Their acting turns only to "behavior" (Hoffmann 1982) since there is no logical, "rational" connection between different elements of the basic narrative situation (Hoffmann 1982) and psychological, social and historical background and codes (Fokkema 1985) are replaced by an intertextual "situation." The dialogical compositional framework enables Barthelme to develop self-reflexivity which draws the readers' attention to the fictitious, artificial status of his characters and to differences between fiction and reality. Most of the characters, as I mentioned above, meditate instead of being able to develop any meanigful action. For example, the queen meditates on her role and function:

"But to be a queen, even a country sort of queen, is toknow boredom. Chatting up the wounded in the hospitals, for instance. God knows they've suffered and are suffering, but there's just not much to say. 'Hallo, where are you from? You seem to be lacking a leg, there.' I haven't the gift for it." (65)

Rid of their individual identities, thus Barthelme's protagonists become only the symbols of various "discourses" and practises and gain a "mythical" role. Barthelme's juxtaposition of real historical personalities (Winston Churchill, a former Polish president Walesa, Ezra Pound), characters known from medieval romances (King Arthur, Launcelot, Guinevere, kings, knights) and "fictitious" characters (journalists) undermine the understanding of historical time and emhasize the "fictitious" character of all events and actions. History, past and present merge into a fictive construct in which these characters gain the symbolic and allegorical dimension. The symbolic characters representing different authorities, different manifestation of power merge into an allegory on the use and misuse of institutionalized power in human history. Thus, for example, not Arthur, Guinevere, but also the other characters represent the symbols of power/colonizers or the colonized/oppressed. The Red Knight, for example, is not only a medieval, but also a contemporary representative of power. His speech is a parodic version of the communist rhetoric, especially a parody on the idea of the collectivity and cooperation:

"'The party embodies the collective wisdom of the people,' said the Red Knight. 'Also, the Party has access to information the individual doesn't have. I much prefer leaving important decisions to the Party than to a crowd of loonies in Parliament.'" (Barthelme 58)

The Blue Knight is a symbolic representative of an aggressor, Sir Robert, the Brown Knight, a past fame of the colonized Scotland, and the Black Knight representing Africa is a representative of an oppressed nation. Barthelme's fragmentary narrative, however, does not only show the inability of man to overcome and distinguish "objective" reality, but through his use of allegorical techniques he emphasizes the negative aspects of power and authoritarian, unitary vision of the world. Allegory is understood, in Craig Owens' terms not as coherent, but rather "fragmentary, intermittent, or chaotic" literary means (Owens 54). History, past and present are presented as chaotic process the common feature of which is the struggle for power and authority. At the same time, Barthelme emphasizes the inability of the individual to perceive objectivity of both history and present. Both are distorted by different discourses, different, mediated and distorted versions of reality through television, film, radio and press. Media, especially radio report on the real historical events (the World War the Second, strikes in Poland in the 1980's), but Barthelme's aim is not to give "an objective" picture of historical events. His characters are both representatives and victims of the real and the latter of the invisible violence and propaganda. Individual radio utterances represent a racist propaganda (Lord Haw-Haw, Ezra Pound), political rhetorics (King Arthur, Winston), or economic and political tracts which are marked by the cliche-like rhetorics typical for each kind of utterance. For example, the racist propaganda is represented by Ezra Pound's speech on the radio:

"'The Bolshevik anti-morale,' said Ezra, 'comes out of the Talmud, which is the dirtiest teaching that any race ever codified. The Talmud is the one and only begetter of the Bolshevik system . . . You would do better to inoculate your children with typhus and syphilis,' said Ezra, 'than to let in the Sassoons, Rothschilds, and Warburgs.'" (7)

Such utterances, "discourses," short tracts merge into a mere rhetoric, clichés, pharases, or "dreck" loosing their meaning:

"Walter the Penniless addressing the multitude.
'And if I say to my flock, 'Hither!' it flocketh hither,and if I say toit 'Thither!' it flocketh thither, for know that I have sought always, I have endeavored to the best of my ability, to shepherd my flock in the directions meseemeth best, even though another might counsel quite otherwise, or a hundred others. Seeking, then, to place yourself with regard to the flock or outside of the flock, as the lamb which strayeth from the flock is outside of the flock, and in mortal danger of the wolf, that seeketh those which falleth away from the flock. And just as the wolf seeketh he who hath fallen away from the flock, the better to engorge him and tear his flesh, so too the miscreant members of the Round Table do batten upon the flesh and treasure of England, against the Devine Will, no matter how they mouth 'Sweet Jesu' and 'Jesu Mercy' and 'Jesu Deliver me' and 'Jesu be your speed' and such like, it is their own worship and pelf they cultivate." (Barthelme 106)

These novels do not explicitly criticize the function and role of both media and popular culture in the contemporary world, but using such typical for postmodernism devices as parody, irony and pastiche express a critical moment which is associated not only with the contemporary culture in general, but also with some aspects of American cultural tradition. Linda Hutcheon stipulates the function and understanding of parody arguing that

"Parody in postmodern art is more than just a sign of the attention artists pay to each others' work . . . and to the art of the past. It may indeed be complicitous with the values it inscribes as well as subverts, but the subversion is still there: the politics of postmodern parodic representation is not the same as that of most videos's use of allusions to standard film genres or texts." (Hutcheon 234)

Hutcheon sees postmodernist parody as ". . . a value-problematizing, denaturalizing form of acknowledging the history (and through irony, the politics) of representations" (Hutcheon 225) and acknowledging its role in contemporary imaginative writing she observes that ". . . postmodern parody does not disregard the context of past representations it cites, but uses irony to acknowledge the fact that we are inevitably separated from the past today - by time and by subsequent history of those representations.There is a continuum, but there is also ironic difference, difference induced by that very history" (Hutcheon 226).

As Hutcheon suggests, one aspect of the use of parody in the postmodernist literary text is its subversive impulse and the ability to show both different "sensibility" of contemporary man through the use different representational devices. These devices draw the percipient's attention to the very nature of the representational process and to ontological questions (McHale 1987).

Both Brautigan and Barthelme use parody as the means of showing the power of language and representation as well as its ability to influence and shape the human vision of the world. It is especially the language of media and popular culture they use to show their subversive function. Barthelme's protagonists' self-relfexive parodic meditations crossing the time and genre boundaries show the understanding of the world as a linguistic process one must find an orientation in in order to be able to perceive at least its partial meaning. The imagery of power developed into the allegory express Barthelme's criticism of both man's use and misuse of both physical and linguistic "virtual" power. The language of media and popular cultural forms becomes his protagonists' language of understanding and perception of reality. This perception, however, is chaotic, incoherent, fragmentary and unstable, for them no coherent and unitary vision of the world is possible.

Brautigan's protagonists, on the other hand, are less self-reflexive, more coherent parodic representatives of their generic prototypes. Brautigan's coherent use of the narrative strategies of the popular genres, especially of the pornography and thriller, criticizes the consumerist moment of American popular culture. Both authors' criticism is expressed especially through their use of parody and irony as a part of their criticism. In Barthelme's case, the parodic effect is mostly achieved through his protagonists' dis/placement in inappropriate contexts in which they use inappropriate language—medieval pompous speech of the genre of the romance is juxtaposed, for example, to the contemporary speech marked by colloquialism and vulgarity. Brautigan's protagonists represent distorted, parodic versions of their generic prototypes and use their language in an ironic context. In the pornographic section of Brautigan's novel, deviant sexual practises do not evoke the sexual excitement, but boredom and disgust, and the end of the novel represent an ironic paradox—Logan brothers who turned from peaceful common children to brutal killers kill, in a brutal scene reminescent of the thrillers, the wrong couple. Their behaviour and acting shows a criticism of some of the American "myths," especially the myth of the sport success, or the myth of a peaceful provincial life. The Logan brothers become killers because their bowling trophies were stolen which symbolically represent their "stolen identity" of peaceful and obedient kids.

Both authors show, as it was suggested, although in different ways, the power of language and linguistic representation in shaping the man's vision of the world. While Barthelme shows man as a victim of this linguistic play and an inability of language to communicate "objective meaning," Brautigan shows the language, especially of popular culture as a representative of consumerism and consumerist culture, as rooted in particular cultural tradition this tradition being influenced by the advanced technology which is able to reach the mass audience and manipulate their cultural tastes.

Mason,1976

"Rootin', Tootin' and Shootin'"
Michael Mason
The Times Literary Supplement [London], 21 May 1976, p. 600.
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Willard and His Bowling Trophies will probably disappoint British readers who have followed Richard Brautigan's activity as a prose writer since his debut in this country in 1970. Many of the qualities that were remarkable and beguiling in the earlier works are missing. One appealing quality these head in common, to speak paradoxically, was their difference from one another. If you had read and enjoyed In Watermelon Sugar, you would probably be surprised, though not less pleased, by The Hawkline Monster. But for Willard, which now follows, Mr. Brautigan seems to have abandoned the protean principle. The new novel has a good deal in common with The Hawkline Monster, though it lacks that book's playful combination of science fiction and the gothic—and indeed any developed strain of fantasy. The Logan brothers, the dispossessed owners of the bowling trophies of the title, are an itinerant party of death-dealers like Cameron and Greer in The Hawkline Monster: only the prototype is not in this case hired gunsels of the Wild West, but a similar motif from American popular narrative: the car-based family gang that robs and shoots its way from state to state.

So a difficulty about Mr. Brautigan's style that has always been near the surface—but from which this reader could be diverted, in two senses, by various and varying solicitations of his interest—presents itself more urgently in Willard than hitherto. The readiest terms here are faux-naïf or "disingenuous," but these descriptions have a pejorative weight which prejudges the case of the deliberately simple stylist. The French word simplesse is said to be appropriately neutral—and there surely is a virtuous brand of calculated simplicity for which it is required. The outstanding exponent of such a style in contemporary American fiction is Kurt Vonnegut, and its famous progenitor Ernest Hemingway.

Sometimes in a Brautigan novel, as in A Confederate General from Big Sur, the numbness and coolness of a stylistic simplesse have served the straightforward purpose of characterizing the narrator (which they distractingly fail to do for Hemingway's Lieutenant Henry, who is not a numb or cool character). Where there is no narrator, as in Willard, the quietness, the casualness, needs a justification in an answering feeling of the author's about how things are, and this is not obviously available. Because it is available with Vonnegut—in his stoicism especially—his books have a beautiful coherence of tone and matter, and yield the kind of deep pleasure which simplicity must afford if it has the chance. The simplicity of Willard feels too much like a stylistic tic for this kind of satisfaction to be possible.

In a simply written novel, moreover, you can mention things, but you cannot say much about them. In such fictions detail will appear with a startling, and potentially irritating, abruptness and transience. Again, Vonnegut's picture of the world can accommodate such a risky accumulation of ephemeral material because of the connectedness that is supposed; the detail will all fit in somewhere later on. On the matter of connectedness, another important issue in modern American fiction, Mr. Brautigan seems clearly to be a sceptic. Indeed the whole thrust of Willard (and its originality, what makes the mystery "perverse") is to bring about a connection that is ludicrous because so unsupported by other examples of connectedness. The Logan brothers somehow track down the stolen bowling trophies, and in so doing slaughter by mistake the married couple whose activity constitutes the other half of the plot. This unique and senseless moment of contact is the only reason the two stories belong between the same covers. Connectedness is replaced by its parodic substitute, conformism: watching the Johnny Carson Show and eating a turkey sandwich, the new owner of the bowling trophies unknowingly joins the "millions of insomniac Americans . . . surrounded by fragments of food that they had just laughed out of their mouths." Willard substantiates an aphorism from Confederate General: "There's no telling the future and little understanding of what's gone before", but it carries with difficulty the weight of randomness that this genial, and congenial wisdom about life's incoherence force it to bear.

I do not know how well Mr. Brautigan fares in Britain, but there is probably something a little deferring to the bookshop browser the images of the author that always appear on the cover of his books—images too suggestive of the ageing trendy, with a figure falling into rotundity at the waist bulging through denim jacket and long but thinning and silkily shampooed hair. It would be a pity if Willard contributed to any resistance to Mr. Brautigan's fiction in this country. He is a writer with a special gift for narratives that have the quality of just-controlled dreams. This means he is not any way outside the mainstream English-language fiction of the past 150 years or so, though some modern British authors have been embarrassed and inhibited by the closeness of fiction-writing to dreaming. Brautigan is not. "What's it about?" he has a character ask of his writing In Watermelon Sugar; the answer is energetic and candid and shallow—"Just what I'm writing down: one word after another."

Morrow,1976

"Willard and His Bowling Trophies"
Patrick D. Morrow
Western American Literature, May 1976, pp. 61-63.
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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 widespread 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 celebration 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. 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 masterpiece. 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 kitschy tale of four horny 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 unmotivated 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 Logan boys taking up ritual murdering, are never explained; and, of course, the wrong people are killed for revenge at the end. Riddle me this: is Willard and Bowling Trophies really "The Emperor of Ice Cream" rewritten as a parable of man's fate? Or perhaps raven-like Willard is the dirty bird of an unjust cosmic consciousness. The style, incidentally, is Brautigan at his worst: Ernest Hemingway on a bad acid trip introduced by unpublished Scott Fitzgerald chapter titles, likely rejected for being too ineffably gorgeous. As content transmogrifies into form here, even wit becomes fashionable cliché.

But Richard Brautigan hasn't betrayed anybody. He just chopped up the pop possibilities of previous productions, stir-fried them with imitation Tom Robbins and Donald Barthelme, then added the no longer secret ingredient of a self-consciously produced formula in reverse English, coming up with a nice, commercial slumgullion. Brautigan never was forced at gun-point to bear his testimony and succeed Wallace Stegner and Wright Morris. Perhaps we expected too much, thinking that if Brautigan had the genius to make a trout so meaningfully reconstitute Lewis and Clark, then the taste of value, the banquet of truth would continue to assume more worth for him than topical schticks. Maybe Brautigan will someday return to creating instead of crafting, and fulfill the promise of his lost or stolen vision. Meanwhile—no possum and no taterséjust sop.

Parra,1981

"Cocinas de Placer [Kitchens of Pleasure]"
Ernesto Parra
Nueva Estafeta [New Courier], 26 Jan. 1981, pp. 100-102.
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On another occasion I found myself at the point of referring to a novella by Richard Brautigan, and in similar circumstances one could experiment with the sensation of being a flea on a hot horn, like the Reverend James Hadley Chase would say.

Without doubt, I want to say that his writing is the closest consequence to military as simultaneous client between the therapies of David Copper and the kitchen of Mayte. And such a combination, at the present date, is most appreciated.

Among the most recent North American narrators, Brautigan will be the most straightforward, the most lineal, but his humor has the touch of a pinch of cayenne in the interior of the nostrils. John Barth is now a classic. Pynchon possesses another intensity of humor; it is more inscrutable and his work more closed. And, although, Frederic Tuten has many elements in common, I continue to bet on the immediacy of Richard Brautigan.

To try again to explain, dear reader, what happens in Willard and His Bowling Trophies would be like playing a game of darts with fresh eggs. It is not that his reading involves less difficulty, either they involve Buster Keaton's film Seven Chances, in one of its sequences one sees a Buster pursuing a multitude of girlfriends, attired ad hoc, provides for all. And is therefore when the text or the monitor detaches from the hilarity for, afterward, a time of calm, to review the infallible wisdom of the phrase: "who you love well, will make you cry."

I do not want to reveal the perverse mystery with which Brautigan subtitled his charade, neither the ending, a pinch more tragedy than the ending of his other novel: The Hawkline Monster. But, since then and comm'il faut I take steps to show the erotic intentions that he clearly made a dissimilar harvest of characters.

There is not the slightest doubt that at least in Willard . . . (the character in question is a species of bird with an odd Monalisa-like character) the intricate workings of argumentation is developed in the strategies of recipes (or formulas), to know: two neighboring and completely foreign pairs: Bob and Constance, who, of a root of some highly contagious vaginal wart which in his due course Bob will be usufructuary, they will be taken to interpret, like a variation of a major force The Story of O in andante con moto cantabile e compiacevolo e preservative. Certainly that on this accidental occasion Miss O (a novelist of twenty three years, recently failed) will share her recipes of pleasure with a hybrid of Silvertre Ornasol and Paganini which, besides, enriches the erotic impasse with the obsessive reading of the Greek Anthology. And for all that, in order to end as it ends.

The other pair (John and Patricia) possess a kitchen of pleasure of absolute accordance with the American way of life. In his life the Greek Anthology does not have bearing, but on the other hand they like equally turkey sandwiches and Greta Garbo, as well as the Johnny Carson Show, which has the same grace as the taped laughs for such events. Besides, Willard and his bowling trophies live in his apartment that the bird guards like Gizé the pharaoh.

And Confession! The Logans (three brothers, three) who are: he who talks on the telephone; he who reads the comics; he who drinks beer, to whom belongs the middle hundreds of bowling trophies, because they are asses and their parents know it. Later, in an Odyssey-like trip, they practice with enviable success the robbery of furniture and gas stations.

Question: And the Logan brothers?

Answer: Forget them.

Rogers,1975

"The Gentle Brautigan & the Nasty Seventies"
Michael Rogers
The New York Times Book Review, 14 Sep. 1975, p. 4.
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Five or six years ago, a popular college dormitory poster featured Richard Brautigan (perennial campus favorite) smiling shyly and extending in invitation, a telephone receiver. Beside his head, in large type, was his San Francisco telephone number.

As I recall, none of the Brautigan devotees I knew ever actually dialed the author. Odd, one might think, but then in those days, undergraduate Brautigan enthusiasts lived—to borrow a phrase from Brautigan's In Watermelon Sugar—"a gentle life," and if in fact someone had dialed and the writer had answered, there likely wouldn't have been all that much to say. Brautigan—charming, delicate, naïve, unsurpassably gentle—had said most of it already.

But times change, and so, likely, Brautigan's telephone exchange. Unchanged, however, is the guileless and unprepossessing Brautigan style—a style that has finally, after a few tentative passes, collided firmly with the harsh and nasty seventies.

Brautigan's sixth novel, Willard and His Bowling Trophies, is essentially about sex and violence. Willard, in standard Brautigan fashion, really has very little to do with any of it. He is, in fact, a mysterious papier-mâché bird, housed on the lower floor of a two-unit apartment building and surrounded by a collection of stolen bowling trophies. Precisely who stole the trophies is not clear, but the original owners are a trio of brothers who lose their jobs, self-respect, and ultimately commit senseless murder in a misguided attempt at revenge. It is, in all, a fairly slim story for 167 pages, but then the art of loose unraveling is a Brautigan cornerstone. This time, however, the unraveling is not a very happy process.

The book begins with two quotations about madness and violence. On the first page we meet Bob, whose memory and powers of concentration are slowly deteriorating. On the next page we meet his girlfriend, Constance. who is being bound and gagged for Bob's nightly session of leather-belt sadism. Constance isn't really all that happy about the sadism, but it develops that the whole thing may be her fault. Constance has contracted warts in her vagina, as the result of a brief, sad affair, and has transmitted these warts to Bob, precluding normal intercourse and pushing him into what she terms "an amateur sadist trip."

We are soon deeply into the spittle-ridden details of Constance's gag, and then, in short order, of Bob's penile warts. While the rest of the book never gets much more intentionally unpleasant than the first few pages, it doesn't get much lighter, either, and the Brautigan humor that used to pop up in even the grimmest places is here little in evidence.

To summarize a Brautigan book is unfair, because his real strengths lie far from sustained plotting. Brautigan's most durable work, in fact, has been his short fiction and verse—shorter pieces containing wit, innovative imagery and unexpected turns of phrase that will almost certainly retain a lasting audience. Willard, unfortunately, shows few of those virtues.

Perhaps Brautigan should make a brief retreat from the novel form. Or perhaps that flat, almost banal, ingenuous style, that worked so well for wistful depictions of loves lost and gained, of good luck and bad luck and loneliness, just isn't right for a long bleak gaze at unhappy sex and senseless murder.

I haven't seen a Richard Brautigan-with-telephone poster for several years, now. But then times do change and, in fact, this is not really the sort of book that would encourage one to dial the author. And there's nothing wrong with that. It's just that even after the harsh and truncated conclusion of Willard, it's nonetheless hard not to imagine that somewhere, Richard Brautigan is still standing, telephone in hand waiting for a call.

Russell,1998

"Richard Brautigan: Child Man of the Atomic Age: A Review of Willard and His Bowling Trophies"
Lawrence Russell
culturecourt.com, 4 Dec. 1998.
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The hippies never produced an author of any value, you say. They didn't read, couldn't write, were just into sex, drugs, and rock 'n' roll. Well then, what about Richard Brautigan? While he's best known for Trout Fishing in America, a good condition copy of the later "novel" Willard and His Bowling Trophies is listed by book-sellers anywhere from $20 to $100 US these days. Willard is typical Brautigan: cryptic, droll in the extreme, seemingly facile, even fraudulent. Reading it today, you think, this is pseudo avant-garde. His characteristic style of brief, repetitious segments (or chapters) which always threaten to sag into the quotidian appear to be a cheat rather than a compression. Sometimes these segments seem to be independent units, complete narratives, understated stories stripped of sub-text and artifice. Their very banality seems insulting, even amateurish. Yet . . .

Two couples live in apartments, one above the other, in the Fillmore district of San Francisco. In the upper one the melancholy Bob and Constance act out a bondage game named after the sex novel The Story of O, a necessity driven by the fact that Bob has venereal warts and he doesn't want to reinfect his wife who gave them to him in the first place. Constance—the name in dramatic denial of the reality—is a junior-league novelist who was initially infected after a one-night stand with a middle-aged lawyer. Bob has forgiven this deadly indiscretion, chooses to navigate their relationship with a "fourth-rate theatre of sadism and despair" interpolated with obsessive readings from The Greek Anthology.

Meanwhile the couple downstairs—John and Patricia—have a normal sex-life and two other basic interests: a papier-mâché bird called Willard and some bowling trophies that were liberated from an abandoned car. John is also aficionado of the Johnny Carson Show, an obsession grown from some minor insomnia. The other characters are a comic book trio called the Logan Brothers, the original owners of the bowling trophies, now in psychopathic limbo as they search America for their stolen artifacts. They have the crude innocence of the mid-west and a "Keep On Truckin'" comic. They are caricatures, but you don't mind this because maybe like Alfred Jarry you yearn for a return to the infantile humor of your youth. Their crime spree escalates as they close in for the inevitable climactic rendezvous with the doomed sensualists in San Francisco, so you realize that their inclusion is metaphoric, that they are merely agents of the cosmic tragedy that has stricken Bob and Constance.

"I'm crying because of all those Greeks," Bob tells Constance as she lies bound and gagged on their bed. The Greeks are all dead of course and there's a sense of approaching finality in their "game", such as their life together has now become. The added irony is that the apartment numbers have been switched as part of a "game" and instead of John and Pat paying the price of the Logan Brothers' revenge, it will be Bob and Constance. All of this is told in a narrative voice that is often petulant, sulky, like an American kid denied ice cream.

You can't help looking for the autobiography within the fantasy as Brautigan—like "Tattoo" of Fantasy Island—came to an ugly end himself. Sex got him. For the male hippy, groupies were the standard by which success was measured, and Brautigan apparently had plenty of them. One of them—just like Constance—passed on a venereal infection that brought him down. But there was no Logan brother with "plenty of death" to shoot him, just his own droll hand.

The avant-garde is always reactionary, is always a response to an emotional vacuum left by a generational status quo and its intrinsic fascist orthodoxy. Brautigan was a psychedelic icon of the San Francisco of the sixties and seventies, his calculated bourgeois nihilism fitting perfectly with the cultural deconstruction of L.S.D. and free verse. For example, in 1968 he "published" Please Plant This Book, a folder of eight seed packets with a poem on each packet. Cool? Or maybe naive. If any writer represents the white American child-man of the Atomic Age, it has to be Richard Brautigan.

Looking at Willard today is like looking at someone's photo album, perhaps Brautigan's. The characters recur in a series of tableaux, their anonymous posturings sometimes pornographic, often funny, lacking dimension, lonely as forgotten trophies in a junk shop.

Eachan,2000

"Richard Brautigan: A Poetics of Alienation"
Tavis Eachan Triance
Half Empty, 2 Feb. 2000.
http://halfempty.com/articles/art/00-03-19.htm
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Richard Brautigan is a writer whose work many people have become familiar with since the publication of Trout Fishing In America in 1967. This parodic, fragmented, yet strangely nostalgic work of fiction captured the interest of a burgeoning youth culture. The willingness of this element of society, to accept anything which established itself in opposition to established social traditions, be it music, literature, drugs, philosophy, or outward appearance, was a phenomenon which created a substantial reputation for the literary experimentation of its author. This popularity has been thought of both by critics and readers, in terms of the generational context in which it occurred.

Brautigan's status as one of the chief icons of a literary audience whose adherence to what was widely perceived as a naive, reactionary hippie culture has unfortunately left him stigmatised by those pejorative notions.

Much of the criticism which deals with his work, suffers from an inability to separate the author from the ethos which swept the period in which it was written. Although both Brautigan's prose and poetry are coloured by the whimsical, highly transparent positively which was characteristic of the hippie generation, these moments are neither indicative of Brautigan's style, nor are they particularly luminous surrounded as they are by the innovative use/misuse of conventional literary forms and devices.

It is this juxtaposition of nostalgic reminiscence, with a parodic, disjunctive rendition of the English language that allows for Brautigan's peculiar "cacaphonic simplicity."

It is as if Mark Twain had somehow become lodged in a player piano which continuously emits a jumble of hauntingly familiar, yet ineffably garbled show tunes.

Generally Brautigan's narrators sound as if they are extremely gentle, even fragile people, who are slightly befuddled by a world which appears too harsh for them to exist within. It is as if the realisation of the pain, frustration, and disappointment of the "actual" world has spurred them to create a surrogate world peopled with nostalgic reminiscence, fantastic occurrence, and the free play of language.

Anatole Broyard, in his appraisal of Brautigan's work states that "[he] sees, hears, feels and thinks things that make some of us feel he's found a better answer to being alive here and now than we have."

It is the previously mentioned sense of narratorial hopelessness which we find in one of Richard Brautigan's later novels Willard and His Bowling Trophies. Although this book does deal with the frustration and sadness which accompanies the perception of a world which has no place for the distinct personality, it is hauntingly devoid of the self-aggrandising optimism which is present in many of Brautigan's other works. Published in 1974 Willard is subtitled a "perverse mystery," exhibiting the author's penchant for presenting his works of fiction as if they were written in accordance with certain established conventions of genre.

The expectations which are projected onto the work as a result of these tags, provides Brautigan with a platform from which to examine the consequences of making groupings, in both literary spheres and in society as a whole. It is likely that he feels structures of inclusively and exclusivity such as these leave him marginalized both as a person, and as a writer, and is therefore inclined to protest them. Willard and his Bowling Trophies is comprised of pseudo-erotic narrative which is combined with a disconnected, rather vaguely orchestrated crime story. This story presents the reader with an array of images which depict the modern persona in various states of marginalization and alienation from modern society.

Traditional forms of linear narrative are re-ordered, and cast into a slowly shifting near stasis. It is as if the author decided to utilise as narration, a collage whose forms were imbued with a sort of viscous motion. These images are gradually strung together, through various idiosyncratic allusions, and permutations of language. The first fragment of the literary Aggregate which Brautigan brings to rest before our eyes, depicts the lives of two residents of San Francisco.

Their ability to exist within American society has begun to degenerate; it is the fault of genital warts, or rather it is the fault of a societal reaction towards sex, sexually transmitted disease, and all of the connotations that have become associated with them. Bob is de-habilitated by the massive force of cultural disdain which is attached to this particular, relatively harmless disease.

"It had never dawned on him to look inside of his penis, down into the urethra. The warts were like an evil little island of pink mucous roses . . . He stood there staring at the warts in his penis. He thought he was going to throw up. Long after he had finished peeing, he was still standing there above the toilet bowl, staring at his penis" (p. 13). It is this sense of alienation from modern culture, and more specifically American Society which is called into question throughout the novel.

Bowling trophies whose symbolic merit leads to the degeneration of the Logan Brothers; three brothers who before the loss of the trophies could have been poster children for the American utopian vision of the 1950's. Even one half of the pronouncedly "normal" couple, who are seemingly immune to the marginalization which abounds, is denigrated; exposed for a cruel latent sexism. The work continually points to the brutally cruel inconsistency / hypocrisy of the normalizing social standards which are in place in modern society. In fact the only character who is depicted in a light which gives him any hope for survival within this culture is Willard, a papier-m#266;ché bird.

Whether these entrenched cultural views have a marginalizing effect, thus driving individuals who do not fit the mold into an illusory inadequacy, or whether they work to supplant them with values which the author sees as being inadequate themselves, society is definitely on a horrific path. This path is illustrated by the anguished cry of one Logan brother, and the analogy which Brautigan uses to punctuate it, "'SOMEBODY STOLE OUR BOWLING TROPHIES!!!' finally broke the silence like a locomotive leaping its tracks and crashing into an ice covered lake to sink instantly out of sight, leaving a giant steaming hole in its wake."

This gaping hole appears to be the watery void which society is bound for if it continues to attribute maximum value to bowling, and minimum value to the individual. It may have been that Richard Brautigan was finally overwhelmed by a strong feeling that the society in which he had chosen to live was one whose major tenets provided no place for him.

In the early 1970's Brautigan moved to Pine Creek Montana refusing to give interviews or lecture for approximately the next eight years. He was found dead of a gunshot wound on October 25 1984.