Friday Fiction: Tom Robbins

--by Hanje Richards
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To some of us middle-aged folks, Tom Robbins was a counter-culture literary hero. For me, his Even Cowgirls Get the Blues is on my list of all-time favorites. I have read it more than once and it has still been a long time since I last read it.
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Most of the Tom Robbins titles that we have at the Copper Queen Library are books I have not read, and some of them are definitely bound for that never-ending TBR (To Be Read) pile that most book people are familiar with. I invite you to enjoy some of the quirky, wildly imaginative, fun and incredible writings of Tom Robbins.
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B is for Beer - In his children's book for grown-ups/grown-up book for children, Tom Robbins takes readers on a whimsical tour of all things beer, written in the language of a bedtime story. Factoids about everything from how beer is made to the number of gallons of beer sold globally each year (36 billion) are woven into this story about six-year-old Gracie Perkel, who craves time with her beer-guzzling Uncle Moe. When Moe disappoints Gracie, she reaches for a drink and is visited by the Beer Fairy, who flies her through the Seam and offers an education about life and, of course, beer.
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Even Cowgirls Get the Blues - The story of Sissy Hankshaw, a woman born with a mutation (though she would not call it a defect or a mutation; she would call it a gift) giving her enormously large thumbs. The novel is a transgressive romp, covering topics from free love to drug use and political rebellion to animal rights and body odor to religions. Sissy makes the most of her thumbs by becoming a hitchhiker. Her travels take her to New York, where she becomes a model for the Countess, a male homosexual tycoon of feminine hygiene products, who introduces her to the man whom she will marry, a staid Mohawk named Julian Gitche. In her later travels she encounters, among many others, a sexually open cowgirl named Bonanza Jellybean and an itinerant escapee from the Japanese internment camps happily mislabeled "the Chink."
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Fierce Invalids Home from Hot Climates - Follows Switters, our wheelchair-using protagonist, across four continents, in and out of love and danger. Through Switters, Robbins "explores, challenges, mocks, and celebrates virtually every major aspect of our mercurial era." (Quote from the hardcover book jacket.) Switters is a CIA agent who hates the government. He's a pacifist who carries a gun. He's as much in love with his seventeen-year-old stepsister as he is with a forty-six-year-old nun. Switters feels that the core of the universe, the heart of existence, is light and dark existing together. One is not separate from the other, they just exist.
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Half Asleep in Frog Pajamas - When the stock market crashes on the Thursday before Easter, you, an ambitious, although ineffectual and not entirely ethical young broker, are convinced you're facing the Weekend from Hell. Before the market reopens on Monday, you're going to have to scramble and scheme to cover your butt, but there's no way you can anticipate the baffling disappearance of a 300-pound psychic, the fall from grace of a born-again monkey, or the intrusion in your life of a tattooed stranger intent on blowing your mind and most of your fuses. Over these fateful three days, you will be forced to confront everything from mysterious African rituals to legendary amphibians, from tarot-card bombshells to street violence, from your own sexuality to outer space.
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Skinny Legs and All - An Arab and a Jew open a restaurant together across the street from the United Nations... It sounds like the beginning of an ethnic joke, but it's the axis around which spins this gutsy, fun-loving, and alarmingly provocative novel, in which a bean can philosophizes, a dessert spoon mystifies, a young waitress takes on the New York art world, and a rowdy redneck welder discovers the lost god of Palestine — while the illusions that obscure humanity's view of the true universe fall away, one by one, like Salome's veils.
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Skinny Legs and All deals with today's most sensitive issues: race, politics, marriage, art, religion, money, and lust. It weaves lyrically through what some call the "end days" of our planet. Refusing to avert its gaze from the horrors of the apocalypse, it also refuses to let the alleged end of the world spoil its mood. And its mood is defiantly upbeat.
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Still Life With Woodpecker - This novel concerns the love affair between an environmentalist princess and an outlaw. As with most of Robbins' books, it encompasses a broad range of topics, from aliens and redheads to consumerism, the building of bombs, romance, royalty, the moon, and a pack of Camels.
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Villa Incognito - The book begins with the story of Tanuki, a raccoon-like Asian creature with a reputation as a shapeshifter and trickster with a lust for sake and women. It should be noted that Tanuki is a tanuki, a member of the species named for him. The cast also includes a beautiful young woman who has unconfirmed Tanuki-blood in her veins, and three American MIAs who have chosen to be "lost" in Laos, long after U.S. involvement in the Vietnam War ended. Typical Robbins-esque debacles ensue when one of the MIAs is arrested with heroin taped to his body while dressed as a priest. Meanwhile, two sisters of one of the missing American soldiers are still searching for their lost relative, unfolding bizarre plot twists that paint a caricature of life in a post-9/11 America.
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Wild Ducks Flying Backward: The Short Writings of Tom Robbins - Essays, articles, observations — and even some untypical country-music lyrics — offer a rare overview of the eclectic sensibility of an American original. Whether rocking with the Doors, depoliticizing Picasso’s Guernica, lamenting the angst-ridden state of contemporary literature, or drooling over tomato sandwiches and a species of womanhood he calls “the genius waitress,” Tom Robbins’ briefer writings exhibit the five traits that perhaps best characterize his novels: an imaginative wit, a cheerfully brash disregard for convention, a sweetly nasty eroticism, a mystical but keenly observant eye, and an irrepressible love of language.
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Embedded in this primarily journalistic compilation are brand-new short stories, a sheaf of largely unpublished poems, and an offbeat assessment of our divided nation. Wherever you open Wild Ducks Flying Backward, you’ll encounter the serious playfulness that percolates from the mind of a self-described “romantic Zen hedonist” and “stray dog in the banquet halls of culture.”