Willard and His Bowling Trophies: A Perverse Mystery is a short novel by the American writer Richard Brautigan, published in 1975. It isn't a book about how to bowl. It's a strange, darkly comic story in which a collection of stolen bowling trophies sets off a chain of events, and it's one of the few literary novels built around the sport.
What it's about
The story is set in a San Francisco apartment building. Upstairs, a couple keeps Willard, a large papier-mâché bird, surrounded by a collection of bowling trophies. Downstairs live Bob and Constance, whose marriage is going through a strained and unusual patch. Elsewhere, the Logan brothers, who once bowled seriously, have spent years hunting for the trophies that were stolen from them, and their search has turned them bitter and dangerous.
Brautigan cuts between these threads in very short chapters, building toward a collision that turns on a small mix-up. The tone shifts between deadpan humor, tenderness and sudden violence, which is why the subtitle calls it "perverse," and the book deliberately leaves several questions unanswered.
How bowling figures in it
The trophies stand for the brothers' lost identity. Bowling was once the thing that made them a team and gave them pride, and losing the trophies sends their lives off course. It's a very American use of bowling: a working- and middle-class pastime where a trophy on a shelf means a great deal.
Where it fits in Brautigan's work
Brautigan is best known for Trout Fishing in America (1967), a cult classic of the counterculture era. In the mid-1970s he wrote a series of novels that played with popular genres, and Willard takes on the mystery. Readers who like it often go on to his other genre experiments of that period, such as The Hawkline Monster (a gothic western).
Bowling in books and films
Bowling shows up more often in fiction than you might expect, usually as a symbol of ordinary American life. For more, see bowling in movies and The Big Lebowski and bowling culture.