Shelf Life — Scott Dickensheets: Tom Robbins’ language challenges the senses

Friday, July 14, 2000 | 9:05 a.m.

Scott Dickensheets' books and magazines column appears Fridays. Reach him at dickens@vegas.com or 990-2466.

Slip in a fresh brain for this one, kids. You want all your neurons at attention for a Tom Robbins novel, all your synapses ready for action. It's not that his prose is dense and demanding or his subtexts philosophically boggling; it's not that his allusions are impossibly scholarly or his plots are convoluted ... well, wait. Check that last one. They are pretty damn freaky. But that's not why.

Here's why. Sample sentence, chosen at random: "(Her eyes) looked like the burners on a dollhouse stove."

It's a lovely image, isn't it? Absurdly specific, crazily offbeat, wholly unexpected. But what does it, exactly, mean? And therein lies the challenge of a Tom Robbins novel: navigating the onrush of his wild, freewheeling language, which is fragrant with unlikely metaphor, spiced with cosmic silliness, sweetened with flaky philosophy. (In other words, it's firmly rooted in the '60s.) For those of you weaned on Clancy, King or that other Robbins -- Harold -- reading Tom Robbins might be like getting your mental carb cleaned with a spritz of LSD (sorry about that metaphor; when you read Tom Robbins, that sort of thing is contagious).

His latest is "Fierce Invalids Home From Hot Climates" (Bantam, $27.50). It's the story of Switters, a rogue CIA agent, "an anarchist who works for the government, a pacifist who carries a gun ..." As he's done with his characters since he broke into prominence with the cult sensation "Another Roadside Attraction" ("the quintessential novel of the '60s" -- Rolling Stone), Robbins loads Switters with over-the-top personality traits. Switters is given to florid, pedantic speeches on the mysteries of the universe, he pops the occasional mind-altering substance and he, ahem, lusts after his underage niece.

The story details how Switters, sent to South America to release his grandmother's parrot, is blindsided by a shaman who feeds him hallucinogens and shows him the secret to transcendence: laughter. Switters spreads the word. But summing up the plot like that is akin to saying that Picasso drew both eyes on the same side of the face. There's a lot of other stuff crammed in there.

Bent on being unorthodox, Robbins tells his tale in the third person, yet -- Mr. Postmodern! -- allows his frisky narrative to address the reader directly, subverting the usual novelistic process of getting the reader to buy into a novel's illusion of reality. Early on, after a brief lecture on the chaotic, associative nature of human thought, the book turns to the camera:

"Now, it appears that this prose account has unintentionally begun in partial mimicry of the mind. Four scenes have occurred at four different locations at four separate times, some set apart by months or years."

Every page has something like that. A Saturday morning in Seattle isn't merely foggy or overcast. It's a "mist-bearded Saturday morning, gray as a ghoul and cool as clam aspic ..." An embarrassed Switters doesn't turn red. "Switters blushed so incandescently he could have hired out his face as a beer sign." His grandmother doesn't just size him up shrewdly. Her eyes "looked like the apertures through which Tabasco droplets enter the world, and the zing zing zing of synaptic archery was very nearly audible." It's not surprising, then, that Robbins pinpoints his germinal creative moment as the first time he popped acid.

And so you begin to grasp why writer Peter O. Whitmer dubbed Robbins "the postmodernist outlaw intellectual." You also can see why a shipshape brain is called for when you read "Fierce Invalids." These wild combinations of words keep coming at you and you have to be ready.

Clearly this is a book most readers will quickly take to or immediately dislike, depending on your tolerance for laughing shamans, absurdist-goofy flights of philosophical fancy, characters who are perfectly well-rounded but completely unrealistic, and tricked-out sentences like those above.

Some find in Robbins a hippy-dippy Woodstock smugness, a rote flower-power freakishness. That's not wholly inaccurate, depending on how you view such things. Perhaps it depends on your feelings about the '60s. Because it can also read like the generous psychedelic promise of that Day-Glo decade reaching fruition.

Myself, I was still playing with Tonka toys when the '60s ended, but I'm going with the latter reading, if only because I'd like to think I'm at least somewhat in tune with the attitude Robbins once ascribed to his characters: "In the end, they insist on joy in spite of everything."

Reading matters

Let's cleanse our palate with a few hits of gritty reality by checking out these two stories: In an essay in the August Men's Journal, war correspondent Scott Anderson writes about the genesis of his yen for dangerous work -- a South American jungle rafting trip with his brother (who also became a war correspondent) when both were teenagers. Good stuff.

Meanwhile, in the just-out August edition of Vanity Fair, "Perfect Storm" author Sebastian Junger checks in with a scary dispatch from Sierra Leone, the African nation brutally rent by civil war. No one is insisting on joy there.