In high school there were a few authors that I absolutely adored and read over and over again: Douglas Adams, Kurt Vonnegut, L.M. Boston and Tom Robbins. I adored Tom Robbins; the man was my hero. His irreverent style and loopy characters were a welcome reprieve from the dry reading foisted upon me by the evil English department. I know Damien and A Brave New World are considered “classics,” but one man’s classic is another man’s private hell, and reading should never be painful. You should never feel intense loathing upon opening a book, which I did. Tom was a much-needed escape from the drudgery and straightforwardness of these doom and gloom novels. So when his newest book, Fierce Invalids Home from Hot Climates, came out, I was so there. I began to read immediately upon getting home…and I’m still reading. This, for me, is beyond odd. I read a book in a day or two, maybe three if I’m being lazy. But this? It’s been months, and I can’t bring myself to finish the last hundred pages. There is only one other book that I have never finished that close to the end and that was The Stand, a book I completely and utterly despised and just couldn’t take anymore. I don’t despise FIHFHC…it just doesn’t interest me. Something feels off. So I sat down to think about it, and I suddenly remembered that I never even made it to the hundredth page of Half Asleep in Frog Pajamas, his previous book. Another oddity for me. Is it me? Have I changed? Do I no longer have the patience for sentences that go on for a page and analogies that make no sense? Looking at my own style of writing (which I have come to realize resembles Tom’s, horror of horrors), I really don’t think that could possibly be it.
So I’m on a mission. I’m reading all of his books again. I want to know if Another Roadside Attraction still makes me want to let Amanda be my pinecone and if my ire continues to rise when I think of what they did to Even Cowgirls Get the Blues on film.
More importantly, I wanted to do this in order, so I could study how his writing style may have changed over the years–but the local libraries wouldn’t cooperate. So we’re doing this in “What the hell do you mean all of your copies of ARA are out?” order. First up: Still Life with Woodpecker.
Now, when I told Melynee about this mission, she got all excited. She loved Tom too. But she made a really interesting comment—she said he’s one of those authors that she loves while she is reading, but can’t remember anything that happened after she was done. I had to laugh, as this totally describes the Tom Robbins experience. Because reading Tom Robbins is sort of akin to an out-of-body experience. You’re kept away from the characters, hovering over their reality, you’re never really sure how you got to where you are, and you’re not sure you want to question it. Still Life is a perfect example of this. I remember loving this book with a fiery passion. It revolves around Princess Leigh-Cheri: the activist daughter of a deposed King Max and Queen Tilli (the country is never disclosed), Bernard Wrangler, aka The Woodpecker: an Outlaw in spirit and on most wanted lists, and their quest to make love stay. It also revolves heavily around the moon, objectism, a pack of Camels and the hidden world therein, the planet Argon, the possible prejudice the rest of the Universe holds against red heads, and pyramids. To make matters even more confusing, he threatens his typewriter quite a bit in-between sections and the final few pages are written in his sloppy handwriting. I’m sorry if you are sitting there going “huh?” right about now, but I really can’t sum it up more coherently than that.
In the long run, none of this really matters, because with Tom the plot has never really been the selling point. It’s the storytelling, whether or not I remember it once I get through it. And, this time around, the storytelling sort of annoyed me. Maybe I’m just getting older, maybe my attention span is shorter, perhaps MTV is to blame or he meandered enough to finally lose me, but I found myself getting anxious for the story to just get along. The characters didn’t grab me and the story wasn’t compelling. And, really, referring to a woman’s vagina repeatedly as a “peachfish” gets pretty fucking annoying pretty fucking fast. One of Tom’s many quirks is that he seems to have taken it upon himself to celebrate womanhood and sexuality, but he does so in a spectacularly odd manner. It’s always been a big theme in his books, and bully for him, really, but it’s almost like he’s trying too hard, like he’s trying to make up for being the boy in fifth grade that couldn’t keep a straight face during Sex Ed no matter how hard he tried. But, Tom, I think you sort of overcompensate at times. It’s a noble effort, really, and appreciated, but no. Sometimes, it just doesn’t flow.
So, sadly, this book was not as gripping as I remembered it. Now I’m kind of afraid to reread Another Roadside Attraction. I have to leave some illusions intact.
My slight annoyance and disappointment set aside, all is not lost, for after much rambling and unraveling of sanity, he does finally give insight on how to make love stay:
“When the mystery of the connection goes, love goes…it is contrary to the nature of mystery to stand still. Yet it’s always there, somewhere, a world on the other side of the mirror…we glimpse it when we stand still.”
Also,
“1. Everything is a part of it.
2. It’s never too late to have a happy childhood.”
Do with that what you will.
Next up: Skinny Legs and All.
“If god didn’t prefer for us to drink at night, he wouldn’t have made neon! Am I right or wrong? And that is NOT a rhetorical question.”
Thanks, Boomer, for that insight. Now, well, where to begin? The man is on crack. Any man that uses the word “mucilaginous” and writes sentences like “With a serene, if tinny, shiver, he/she centered him/herself at that spatial crossroads where Intimacy and Elsewhere intersect, and reviewed from a philosophical vantage, the strange situation in which he/she found him/herself.” about a can o’ beans is clearly on crack. Which I am not adverse to, by any means, just merely making an observation.
Having established this, which is important to being able to relax and understand the story, Skinny Legs went over much better than Woodpecker. The sentences are just as meandering, the plot takes just as long to surface, and the character of Dirty Sock (literally a dirty sock) is pure fluff, but this book just seemed to gel more completely. And that’s saying a lot for a story that boasts as some of its main characters a can o’beans, a dirty sock, a conch shell, a painted stick and a silver spoon. Perhaps because the plot, though distractingly convoluted at times (if I attempted to compile a short list of the topics it touches it would include such abstract ideas as love, religion, animosity in the Middle East, art, inanimate animate objects, the dance of the seven veils, Jezebel and the silliness of it all), is a little more straightforward? The characters more likeable? The heroine, though not perfect, certainly less annoying?
I’m sure these factors help considerably, but it probably has more to do with the fact that I first read this book when I was attending church with my mother–pretty much out of a sense of duty–every week, and was trying to figure out religion’s purpose in the world. A daunting task for any age, but especially problematic for a confused 17-year old. Tom somehow managed to put a lot of my own incoherent, slowly forming ideas into print—it was almost as if he was in my head. Having someone else, no matter how insane he was, be on my side, no matter how unknowingly, was an amazing thing. And continues to be so.
Ostensibly, the book is about Boomer Petway III, who loves spy novels, and his artist wife, Ellen Cherry, who loves art and thinks that maybe Boomer tricked her into love with a giant mobile home in the shape of a turkey, and the various people who wander in and out of their lives as they struggle with the inanities of life, the trauma of trying to hold onto something as elusive as love, and the New York art scene. Trials, tribulations and shootings occur and, in the end, a few reach enlightenment, thanks to a shy young belly dancer and a painting by Ellen Cherry, who always sees reality with a slightly different eye than the rest.
But really, though it takes the entire book to get there, Skinny Legs purpose is to spout Robbins’ theological wisdom, such as it is. In a much condensed nutshell:
- Earth is a “sexual globe, a theater, a rotating stage,” and no matter how much the patriarchal society attempts to tone down the great mother’s, and women’s, sensuality, it will always resurface. It is the natural order of things.
- “Human beings do not have dominion over the planets and animals…it could not blind itself to the wonders of nature without mutating into something too monstrous to love.”
- “…it was futile to work for political solutions to humanity’s problems because humanity’s problems were not political…The primary problems were philosophical, and until the philosophical problems were solved, the political problems would have to be solved over and over and over again.”
- “…religion was an improper response to the Divine…[it] entered into its unholy alliance with politics, it became the most dangerous and repressive force that the world has ever known.”
- Money is a man-made illusion. And when “…a state or an individual cited ‘insufficient funds’ as an excuse for neglecting this important thing or that, it was indicative of the extent to which reality had been distorted by the abstract lens of wealth…”
- And, one of my favorites: Time is a recent invention. “…the past was a recent invention, that people sacrificed the present to a future that never really came, that those who tied all of their dreams to an afterlife had no life for there to be an ‘after’ of…and that on every conceivable level, belief in a hereafter was hazardous to health…Every day is Judgment Day. Always has been. Always will be. The dead are laughing at us.” This one really touched home. Especially the “every day is Judgment Day” because, really, isn’t it about treating people with respect and love every day, and not just because “someone” might be watching? Can you really treat people as if they are beneath you and unworthy of whatever deity you worship’s love, and assume you are saved because you go to church? In my tour of duty at church, I met a lot of people with this attitude, with an “I’m better than you, I’m god’s chosen” holier-than-thou bearing in their walk and talk that infuriated me. No one’s better than anybody else, no matter who you believe in, and your actions do matter, whether or not something is looking over your shoulder. And I truly believe, afterlife or no, that the dead are laughing at us. I know I would be.
- Also, this one I believe in strongly, too: “Everybody’s got to figure it out for themselves…and when you finished, you didn’t call the Messiah. He’d call you.”
And while you may or may not agree with any of this, Tom had a point, and it makes sense in Tom’s universe. And maybe that’s what Still Life was missing: a point. It talked of love and outlaws-who-bomb and personal freedom, but love is love, a bomb is nothing but a question, and personal freedom is something we all have to find for ourselves. However, religion is in our face every day; people use it to tell us what to believe, how to interpret events, who to interact with and how to live our lives. Wars are declared over it, people killed in its name and monuments built to it. I think when Tom wrote Skinny Legs he had something to say, he was trying to find answers to the confusion that wracks the world on a daily basis, as opposed to maybe just trying to entertain himself and write a cute story about deposed princesses and their assistants that get hooked on coke in their old age.
Or maybe I was just a confused 17 year old looking for anyone to let me know that it was okay to believe what I wanted to.
2000-11-01